competitive capability and business growth. As one corporate executive put it in a June 2014 IDC white paper: "If you can't sim-plify, you can't remain competitive."

Contributing to IT Complexity For such a major problem, complexity is also a slippery one. As Garbani puts it: "There is precious little information as to what complexity is and how to evaluate it." But if there isn't yet a standard definition of complexity, there are certainly plenty of obvious reasons for its existence. The big-gest, of course, is the number and variety of technologies, systems, and vendors involved in the IT infrastructure of any midsize to large enterprise. These infrastructures typi-cally involve a patchwork of new and legacy systems, physical and virtual servers, widely scattered data centers, and public, private, and hybrid cloud-storage environments. Then there's big data, which Gartner defines as "information of extreme size, diversity, and complexity." It's no secret that big data is creating entirely new chal-

SIMPLIFYING IT: CAN YOU? SHOULD YOU?

s information technology inevitably complicated? Ask many people

on the business sideand even some IT professionalsand they'll

probably answer "yes." After all, what could possibly be more com-

plicated than the ever-growing, constantly changing IT infrastruc-

tures, systems, and apps that now underlie just about every aspect

of every business?

But ask whether all that complexity guarantees greater efficiency

or productivity, cuts costs, enables innovations, or better supports

employees, customers and other IT end users, and you're likely to

receive a resounding "no."

Technology strategists say it's important to balance IT com-

plexity against business objectives. "Some IT complexity is indeed

inevitable and can, in fact, be a major driver of business value

by contributing to the creation of a more differentiated offering,

for example," Michael Grebe and Enno Danke acknowledge in

their 2013 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report, Simplify IT:

Six Ways to Reduce Complexity. But, they add: "Much complexity

is ultimately unnecessary and can translate into higher costs and

reduced agility and flexibility."

No question: Simplification is among today's biggest IT chal-

lenges. Many IT organizations rightly view complexity "as the root

cause of all IT operations ills," Forrester Research analyst Jean-

Pierre Garbani notes in his 2011 report, Assessing Complexity in

IT Operations.

And concern extends beyond IT departments, up to the highest

strategic levels. In the past few years, surveys and reports docu-

mented executive fears that complicated IT infrastructures not only

create operational challenges and increase costs, but also threaten

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The Many Causes of IT ComplexityWhat makes some IT environ-ments so complicated? Experts say contributing factors include, among others:

Corporate mergers and aquisitions

Reliance on legacy systems

Server sprawl

Skyrocketing storage needs

Rapidly changing business requirements

Increasing demand for mobile- device support

Suboptimal mix of IT skills

Decentralized IT decision- making

I

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lenges for the IT organizations responsi-ble for processing, securing, and storing all that information, because existing options are either too limited or too expensive to scale up. "Meeting expectations for big data means navigating a confusing mix of tech-nology that is evolving faster than anyone ever expected," Brian Hopkins, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, notes in a November 2014 report. Two other developments contributing to IT complexity are:

The "bring-your-own-device" (BOYD) trend, where employees increasingly use their personal mobile devicesespecially smartphones, but also tablet computerson the job. IDC, another IT research and consulting company, esti-mates that of 480 million smartphones to be shipped worldwide by 2016, fully two thirds will be used for BYOD. That development can help companies save significantly on hardware purchases. But it also generates plenty of new concerns about how to service and secure all these different employee-owned devices.

The Internet of Things (IoT), where devices ranging from cardiac pacemakers to forest-fire sensors to highway traffic monitors can transmit informationsuch as updates on changing condi-tionsover the Internet without human intervention. Gartner estimates that by 2020 more than 26 billion devices will be connected via the IoT. The fast-growing network also increases IT complexity and the demands on IT organizations.

Suggestions for SimplificationNot surprisingly, IT simplification is any-thing but simple. In most cases, complexity has developed gradually, stemming from a range of sources, and, of course, scenarios differ dramatically from one organization to the next. However, experts offer three pieces of advice for helping IT profession-als address IT complexity:

1. Determine how much IT complexity is needed to meet business objectives. "There are potentially good business reasons to embrace complexity," For-rester analyst Alan Mac Neela blogged. For example, companies may need especially sophisticatedand compli-catedIT environments to support new product launches, provide services unique to their marketplaces, or comply with strict regulatory requirements. He recommends that organizations turn to enterprise architects who can help deter-mine the level of complexity neededand the tradeoffs associated with each choice. "Higher levels of complexity typi-cally mean higher costs (directly or indi-rectly), so they must be associated with a business return," he noted.

2. Educate the business side about IT service costs. "Due to a lack of trans-parency into IT costs, the business may request a degree of IT support for a given product or service that is disproportionate to [its] business value," in turn creating additional complexity, according to Grebe and Danke. They recommend that IT organizations provide their business counterparts with a comprehensive look at the costs associated with these requests. "Armed with this informa-tion, the business can make informed judgments about its consumption of IT servicesin terms of volume and service levelrelative to business out-comes," the strategists explain in their report.

3. Establish a comprehensive, integrated approach to business and IT gover-nance. Developing an enterprise-wide governance framework helps align all business and IT planning processes, experts say. In turn, that integration ensures that a company's technol-ogy spending will actually lead to the desired business outcomes, and not just create more complicated IT.

Is reducing IT complexity worth the effort? Yes, according to the BCG report: "We estimate that an effective simplifica-tion effort can reduce application infra-structure costs by up to 50 percent and total IT costs by as much as 30 percent."

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTS CAN HELP DETERMINE

AND THE TRADEOFFS INVOLVED.THE LEVEL OF IT COMPLEXITY NEEDED-

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1/2 TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTS

10% - 30% overall cost reduction

40% - 70% down-time reduction

$3,610 per user in savings

SOURCE: IDC

STREAMLINE IT FOR SIGNIFICANT SAVINGS In one 2014 study, companies that undertook IT simplification efforts reported, on average:

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