I missed this article by Chad Dickerson of Infoworld about his suggestion that instead of trying to manage complexity, IT people should look for simplicity. It is a point from our book, so I am going to blog about it now.

You read about IT complexity in vendor marketing materials, consultants offer to help you manage complexity, and people like me write about it in the IT press. Complexity is something that many IT professionals have come to accept in their daily work, but what if we turned the complexity discussion on its head and focused our efforts on managing simplicity? Managing simplicity means seeing through some of the complexity hype and making a concerted effort to look for the simplest solution to IT problems. In my experience simple solutions often deliver value at a reasonable cost, whereas many complex ones produce only headaches.

He then proceeds to give an example from his own experience:

The temptation always exists in IT to over-engineer solutions to simple problems. When I first started at InfoWorld, I was handed a quarter-million dollar quote for a portal solution from a vendor who will remain nameless. In this particular case, the need for a portal or portal-like functionality had not even been identified within the company, but someone in my group had been seduced by a vendor. After sitting through a pitch about how our employees could receive customized and up-to-date industry news, stock quotes, and about how they would be able to share knowledge with one another, I spoke to our employees about their needs. The primary request was for easy access to traffic analysis for InfoWorld.com. I killed the portal project, put up an Apache server running Linux on existing hardware, and hand-coded HTML links to our Web site traffic analysis software.

We’ve since outgrown that level of simplicity and need to focus more on enabling collaboration among decentralized teams. Although the quarter-million dollar portal would probably fulfill our current needs, I’m planning to experiment with Movable Type instead. With a centralized Weblog publishing system that automatically pushes out RSS content, InfoWorld employees can post information to a company Weblog, consume the updates with an RSS news aggregator, and search the knowledge base it creates. Not a full-fledged "portal" perhaps, but a simple and elegant knowledge management application that solves a set of problems in a very simple way (and at a cost of about $150 for a commercial license plus a little staff time).

Let's take note as this is a very useful example. (As you can see, the article was the basis for the Inforworld 8internal blog that is the subject of the previous post). Perhaps, with this kind of arguments, we could get even IT professionals on our side. After all, these are emergent times... Any ideas?

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