To rid themselves of unnecessary complexity, corporations will need comprehensive self-assessment to create a plan for transforming their systems and making them simpler. Corporations can take immediate steps to untangle most of their unwanted IT complexity by focusing on the following six specific activities, which, taken together, will help them transform the way they use and manage IT, thus making IT organizations leaner and companies better prepared for the end of the downturn:
Understand and target the root causes of complexity.
Install self-managing systems, such as autonomic computing.
Consider consolidation of hardware and software.
Regenerate the company's IT architecture.
Plan for outsourcing of certain applications.
Develop a management culture in IT.
By reducing this kind of IT complexity, corporations position themselves to benefit as growth continues. They will then need to add systems, but they will be able to do so more quickly and at far less expense by pruning complexity now. Adding an application to a streamlined, integrated IT platform, for example, requires less systems development and integration work.
