Complexity

The best strategy in the world flounders on poor execution.

A good few years back, I was in the audience at an EY conference, the moderator put the following question to the then CIO of BMW "What is the worst trait of the South African workforce?". The Teutonic CIO replied "Boer maak 'n plan". Which literally translates as "the farmer makes a plan" - which to the average South African means an ingenious workaround to keep things working. My immediate reaction was that of offence, but as he expanded on the point, I realised that the very thing which makes us able to respond in an agile way - the out of the box, rule breaking approach - is great to maintain momentum, however it also introduces a fragility at scale.

Complexity - the house of cards

If you have been in the IT world for any length of time, you will have seen brilliant solutions, solutions that deliver exactly what the business requires, but solutions that are dependent on a large number of components. What differentiates the building blocks in the IT world from a physical building is the transitory nature of the building blocks - every hardware and software component has a finite lifespan before it is either retired or upgraded/patched. How many of you have seen a dependency matrix that makes you want to run and hide? I have seen a few where I visualise Sisyphus continually pushing the rock up the hill, only to have to push it up again - because I can see that the back to back upgrade cycles means there isn't ever a gap until the next component needs upgrading!

Simplicity - less really is more.

As a practical example. hyperconverged is one of those abstractions that, done right, seeks to reduce the complexity by enabling infrastructure as code. This extrapolated into the new Multicloud world - with its own inherent complexities - leads us to a more platform based approach, as the logical progeny of the object oriented mindset.

Reducing complexity has the pleasing side effect of improved stability, but what business will really thank you for is the improved agility and time to market. Change is the only constant and we need to be building with that in mind...