Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

CHAPTER 4

What Do You Want Your IT to Do, Anyway?

Information technology is complicated stuff. Although we've tried to simplify how to interact with IT, there's no denying the complexity of its inner workings. As time goes on, IT becomes more and more complex, as the power of the technology goes up, the number of dependencies and interactions among disparate technologies increases, and as we use that new power to tackle increasingly complex tasks. People, however, have a limited tolerance for such complexity. Sure, there are a few people who desire the latest gadgets and thrive on getting immersed in tech talk, but your average person would just as soon avoid excess complexity.

EVERYONE'S A GRANDMA

If you think about our lives outside of work, technology isn't really that complicated, since the vendors of such technology must serve the lowest common denominator and make their technology so that as many people as possible can consume it. As a result, our environments look little like the Jetsons' world of fancy gadgets and complex controls and flashing lights everywhere you look. Instead, think about where complex technology lies—in automobiles, mobile phones, microwaves, and the like. You can easily see that these devices are complex on the inside yet simple on the outside—simple to learn, simple to operate, and simple to understand (or, at least, the good ones are). After all, simplicity of design is a virtue, even if the underlying technology is very complex.

Why, then, is ...