“Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.” Alan Perlis
Last week’s IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis – London Chapter meeting, kindly hosted by Credit Suisse) revealed a wealth of opportunity.
While the financial markets are struggling with low growth, increased volatility, low margins, and the enveloping burden of increased regulation (e.g. Frank Dodds), the requirements for IT change still come…and come…to do more for less.
Any company in possession of an IT estate consisting of duplicated systems, application and interfaces (see Conway’s Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_law), must be in want of simplification.
The opportunity… is to step back from tactical solutions and consider:
- the lifetime cost of the change for RoI calculations,
- how to leverage and re-use the existing estate,
- consolidating systems and ‘clean up’ of the infrastructure
- adopting standard data and methods
The cleaner the operating model, the easier it will be to:
- show regulatory compliance,
- find the truth in data
- ease estimation of the costs of Acquisition + Merger integration
When this also allows progress toward the architect’s Target Operating Model (TOM), it spreads a common language and understanding across the business.
So… the recommendation is to make time for real design, take steps towards the TOM, and reject the tacticals!
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
November 12, 2012 at 9:16 am
‘… reject tacticals’ well … there’s nothing wrong with tactical approaches to solutions, they’re a perfectly legitimate way to evolve in many use cases albeit they might give rise to some increased risk of generating technical debt, … but OTOH, it all depends on context. Sometimes a window of business opportunity has a known and limited lifespan. Developing a strategic solution to such a problem can be a case of extreme over-engineering, where really a ‘throw away’ approach with ‘just enough’ quality would suffice and help maximise return. If you’ll excuse my insensitivity, when doing so make sure you don’t polish your throw away tactical turd too brightly or you’ll be living with it’s stink for longer than you really want to.
And what about agile principle’s and the mantra of management of uncertainty. How does that play into the desire to focus on standardised strategic infrastructure I wonder ?
of course I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I have seen my share of technical debt and I know the devastating consequences of prolonged tactical solution design (i.e. it leads to a ‘rip and replace’ architecture which can get pretty expensive). But … sometimes for a business it’s about survival (now) and not promises of the brighter future that tommorrow might bring if only you can make it that far !