| One of the most difficult challenges facing IT organizations today is ensuring alignment with business objectives in terms of quality, flexibility, initial cost, and time to market. In computing, opportunity breeds complexity. Moreover, complexity begets systems that can be unreliable and difficult to manage. In most medium to large-sized IT organizations, there are now numerous applications and environments that weigh in at tens of millions of lines of code, and they require substantially skilled IT professionals to install, configure, tune, debug, upgrade, and generally maintain them. This means that the difficulty of managing today's computing systems goes well beyond the administration of individual software environments. There is a need to integrate several different environments into corporate-wide computing systems and make them work. This goes beyond company boundaries into the Internet and introduces new levels of complexity. Computing systems' complexity appears to be approaching the limits of human capability, yet the relentless march toward increased interconnectivity and integration rushes ahead unabated. New technologies, such as wireless, will increase the complexity even more. We do not see a slowdown in the progression of Moore's Law. (For a more detailed discussion of Moore's Law, see Chapter 5.) Rather, it is the IT industry's exploitation of technological growth inherent in Moore's Law that leads us to the verge of a complexity crisis. Software companies now have massive computing power, which can produce ever more complex applications that run on even more complex IT infrastructures. Add to this mix network and communications technology and the complexity increases by several orders of magnitude. The domino effect applies here. Software packaged applications aren't providing much, if any, relief from the traditional organizational need to customize enterprise applications. They pose system and network management challenges that also aren't getting any simpler to handle. The result is more complexity. More complexity means more time and more resources to manage the complexity; so the costs begin to rise. Many surveys have been conducted that ask CIOs and their staff the following basic question: "What IT applications or technologies are becoming too complicated to manage?" The responses and results have been predicable. -
Integrating the Web and standard legacy-based systems. -
Implementing custom software packages. -
Integrating new Java™-based software. -
Constructing object-based and distributed architectures. -
Data warehousing. -
Implementing new e-business systems. |
