Complexity ex Machina: the way we search for simplicity

“It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Complexity and the System

Today it looks like there is no organization in a world that does not have a complexity issues. Organizations start small and adaptive, and then they grow, becoming more interconnected and next morning - you are running complex matrix based organization.

People are still looking for the ways how to keep or introduce simplicity with increasing need for business agility. Best practices are strongly connected with managing complexity out of the environments so that business can see quick benefits and value from any IT related investment. Sometimes you look for the solutions inwards, sometimes you are bound to look somewhere else, but in an essence there is an everlasting quest for making things better: the moment we solve one problem, there is another one to work on.  

Enterprise is complex, consumer is straightforward?

When we talk about complexity of business environments, we usually think about large enterprises. Technology and business architectures, governance, distributed environments, security, data explosion, expectations of the end user all contribute to the complex environments. Then, there is also a time factor – instead of replacing the complex systems with more streamlined ones, we are adding additional layers of complexity by keeping a legacy systems and integrating them with the new ones. On top of that, just to make everything even more interesting, we are keeping or introducing business processes, that make consolidation almost impossible.

For most of the companies, trying to move forward is a painful set of activities that are required to discover, understand and work with myriad of ideas and technologies that are part of the system.

In last ten years, we see an emerging force that is changing that dramatically. And it did not started with a reducing a complexity of existing systems, instead it created totally new playground – consumer environment. There is no place for complex systems there. Everything must be clean, quick and understandable at first glance. Solutions and systems must be lean and configurable so that we connect majority of the potential customers, but still keeping that configurability out of the complex zone. That approach taught us a lesson or two how to look at the solutions and how we should keep them or move them out of the complexity zone.    

Business complexity first, software second

The quest itself most of the time becomes complex adventure: we think that all our problems can be solved with some form of the application (“there is an app for that”). Finding an right solution for a right problem is interesting task not only from the perspective of someone who is developing software (multiple libraries, frameworks, integration points, tools and products) but also from the business perspective (features and functionalities). Even if we can hide the development complexity from end customer, it is very hard to remove business complexity from the end product. Let’s admit that one: we are very complex by our nature. Systems that we create are ever tangled web of strategies, plans, processes, activities and executions that are trying to achieve the predicted success of the company.

To make it even worse, from time to time we introduce fundamental changes in enterprise organization. Trying to keep organization agile and acceptable of disruptive changes and innovation, we are ready to dramatically alter already existing environment – only paranoid, in a way, survive.  

Complexity kills Productivity

One of the most obvious examples of complexity that basically kills productivity is email (which was introduced as a solution for a number of our problems). If you go back to the early 90-ties, we all saw the advent of the Internet and related services as a great tool to move faster and increase productivity. Instead of numerous phone calls and fax letter exchanged between two or more parties in business relationship, we could use email as a new way to track progress, start activities or exchange the information. And, at the beginning that was a great move forward: instead of one or two sales activities per day, we quickly started to be way much more productive, running two dozen (at least) opportunities at the same time.

This leads to more complexity, of course: we are driving multiple issues concurrently, moving back and forth between specific tasks. So, we feel that we are very productive and that we are driving all the important activities in our organization. But from the outside, people are waiting for you answers, they are stuck in a place because you are not responding to their requests and so on. This is universally true for any type of organization: every single work process expands in a complex environment, and you need to think radically different to manage those issues.  

What are the next steps in this journey?

There are multiple ways to solve complexity issue. But, we will dive into them in one of the following posts. For now, let’s just finish with the general idea: can’t do that in one shot. Can remove complexity with a management decision and no policy will do that automatically. We are on our own devices to think of solution, and of course, little bit of help coming from your friends.