Dan Farber writes:
After years of assisting customers in building increasingly more complex, real-time IT environments, Gartner has targeted “conquering complexity” as the theme for Symposium/ITxpo 2005 in San Francisco. Peter Sondergaard, Gartner head of global research, attributed complexity to the constant search for a silver bullet to solve all problems, the implementation of point solutions and short term thinkingno architectural approach.
Executives tend to push complexity into IT departments, asking for solutions that arent easily delivered. No big revelation. Most IT shops end up with pockets of complexity trying to keep up with the demands of employees, partners and customers. Just look at the nest of wires in a server room or the number of disparate components required to deliver a piece of information to an end user in the field.
Armed with the new theme, Gartners 700 analysts can now deliver its advice in a neat complexity wrapper. Its Gartners new service-oriented architecturelook at IT through the lens of managing complexity. (Heres a transcript of the keynote presentation.) The research firm even came up with a value of complexity metric, which posits that you can get value from systems by adding more complexity, but only up to a certain point (somewhere around the top of a Bell curve), beyond which you get negative returns. No surprise there
