It’s an adage as old as time (or at least as old as the invention of the personal computer): Technology is destined to cycle constantly between complexity and simplicity.
Remember the hassle of attaching peripherals in the days before USB ports? Remember the anguish of developing applications for competing OS interfaces before HTML? We fixed those problems, and look at that, we’ve moved on to others.
“Complexity grows over time,” says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. “Systems are built to do one thing, and then they’re modified, morphed and bastardised to do things they were never meant to do.”
Complexity also occurs when technologies overlap one another – “when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it,” says Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting.
More of the CIO.com post from Howard Baldwin
