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• A Workbook for Managing Business/IT Complexity
  26 Oct 06 | Workbooks
  
  

  This workbook offers a step-by-step approach for addressing the complexity in your firm, for deciding where complexity is good and where it is bad, and for identifying appropriate change initiatives. It provides and explains a number of tests and models that can be used to assess your current situation. We suggest that you work through the ten basic steps described in this book, answering the questions and completing the exercises given. This will help you to understand your situation and define actions to improve it.

• Practical Approaches for Managing Complexity
  8 Nov 06 | Presentation
  
  

  Good complexity delivers value that the customer will pay for, as in the case of an Apple iPod that is internally quite complicated, yet very easy to use. At the other extreme, complicated and redundant administrative procedures clearly reduce value for both supplier and customer, and can become a real drag on the enterprise. In between are situations, such as disparate product lines and sales/marketing organizations, where the value of complexity often depends on your point of view.

  See event: Managing Business and IT Complexity – Aligning Diversity with Value (8 November 2006)

• Standardizing Generic IT: A Practical Approach 10-24-05
  24 Oct 05 | Presentation
  
  

  Kirt Mead outlines the ´Workbook´ approach that is emerging from this effort, as well as lessons learned in early applications of this cutting edge new methodology.

  See event: Standardizing and Simplifying IT Infrastructure and the Installed Base – A Practical Approach (3 Nov 2005)

• Standardizing Generic IT: A Practical Approach 9-27-05
  27 Sep 05 | Presentation
  
  

  Kirt Mead is working with some of 17 major firms in the US and Europe to develop a practical analysis approach (called the 'Workbook') for identifying infrastructure and processes that could be simplified, as well as the basic approach to be taken.

  In this presentation, he outlines the ‘Workbook’ approach that is emerging from this effort, as well as lessons learned in early applications of this cutting edge new methodology.

• The ‘deep structure’ of IT
  1 Jun 05 | Journal Articles
  
  

  The future of IT and the business lies in moving to generic non-differentiating components connecting at standard interfaces.
  
  The only non-standard processes will be those few that are the source of the firm’s distinctiveness and particular added value.
  
  The emerging ‘deep structure’ of IT – which we must get right – is the placement and definition of these standard interfaces.

• Standard Infrastructure – Freeing IT to add more value
  21 Apr 05 | Single Topic Reports
  
  
  Firms need to standardize, simplify and even outsource many generic business functions and processes if they want to reduce costs and improve responsiveness. The same applies to IT; if it is going to participate more in the creation of advanced services and ‘smart products’, it first has to save itself from drowning in low-value work. Rather than just keeping legacy systems ticking over, IT should seek to eliminate many of them through standardization and outsourcing to specialized suppliers.
  
  This report presents the first results of a programme of research into IT infrastructure and the increasingly strategic role it will play.
  
  It is based on interviews with 17 large organizations in the US and Europe, most of whom believe that, in order to manage complexity and control costs, they will have to reduce many current systems to standard services and rely much more on standard ‘components’ in new systems development.
• Simpler IT
  8 Mar 05 | Presentation
  
  

  IT organizations today devote enormous resources to the care and feeding of information system complexity that delivers limited business value. Moreover, this complexity directly contributes to the disappointing project success rates that grip many IT organizations. By making IT simpler, more IT resources can be successfully applied to supporting the innovative, complex business activities that lead to delivery of customer and business value.

  Peter Burris highlights how IT organizations can take immediate steps to simplify IT by:

  • providing an approach for associating business value with IT decision making

  • surveying the technology, business and institutional trends catalyzing change in complex application environments

  • showing how these trends can be applied to simplify IT operations, application delivery and business decision making.

  See event: The Future of the IT Organisation