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April 2, 2001

RADICAL SIMPLICITY
Uncomplicating IT: Simpler Said Than Done

Something's very wrong when technology even gets the best of the experts. But how to make things right? Forethought and sweat equity--from vendors and IT managers alike.

By Eric Chabrow (echabrow@cmp.com)

Illustration by Nicholas Wilton

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Simple Twist Of Fate
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InformationWeek Research: Overcoming IT Complexity
InformationWeek Events: The Spring 2001 InformationWeek Conference

avid Gelernter has an IT resumé to die for. He's a full professor of computer science at Yale University whose teaching and research focuses on such subjects as expert databases and information-management systems. He has co-authored textbooks on programming, and written popular books on science and social history such as Machine Beauty: Elegance And The Heart Of Technology and 1939: The Lost World Of The Fair. Gelernter also hopes to start a business to market a new user interface that organizes data by time instead of space.

So why can't he get his family's new PC running right?

Witness what happened last month to Gelernter and his 13-year-old son Daniel, who Dad describes as a "first-rate hacker and excellent programmer." Sound from the system's speakers came and went. A functioning joystick from an older computer refused to work with the new one. Gelernter and son fiddled for weeks, but success eluded them. "If a computer scientist can't get it to work properly in three weeks," he says, "imagine the problems others face." (See related item on Gelernter, "Innovation").

Indeed. More than a half-century has passed since the invention of the Eniac computer and two decades since the introduction of the PC. Yet today's IT systems--in the home, the office, and the factory alike--are fraught with complexity and difficulty. Companies spend millions of dollars for help-desk support and troubleshooting technicians to untangle problems as PCs freeze, servers crash, Web sites go down, and networks fail.

Ninety percent of 250 IT and business managers surveyed by InformationWeek Research last month say IT is more complex to manage than ever before. The same percentage of respondents say simplifying IT leads to greater business benefits. "Simplification is absolutely essential," says Michael Yasukawa, director of research and planning at the Chicago Fire Department's Bureau of Support Services, which is implementing a system to catalog reports on all fires. "Without people feeling comfortable with the system, it's not going to work."

Where does IT's complexity come from? Other sophisticated technologies such as the automobile and the telephone don't challenge and frustrate their users to the extent that computers do. That's because IT is more intricate, says Staples Inc. CIO Brian Light. "If we had just one application like the telephone to deliver, our reliability would be outstanding, too," he says. "We have to deliver so many apps that are so different from the next that we're likely to have more issues than other technologies."

Many say vendors don't do as much as they could to make IT products easier to use--and purposefully so, as at least one observer sees it. "They're designed by engineers conscious of every element of the whole system, and they try to show the complexity of the system in the interface they design," says Larry Hawes, a senior analyst at the Delphi Group.

While some products are just poorly designed, the nature of the product and the marketplace can encourage complexity. An individual customer might use only 20% of a word processor's capability, while another utilizes a different 20%, and almost nobody uses the remaining 60%--yet the vendor sees that functionality as the product's competitive advantage.

So how do you achieve simplicity? It boils down to this: IT's complexities must be absorbed in the right places so they won't intrude in the wrong ones, says management consultant Bill Jensen, author of Simplicity: The New Competitive Advantage In A World Of More, Better, Faster (Perseus Press, 2000). "Everything can't be simpler for everybody without somebody doing the work," he says. "Getting something simple or elegant is very, very hard work." Vendors must labor hard by working with customers to make their products easier to use, and IT managers must work hard to design systems that are elegant and can be easily adapted to changing needs, says Jensen.

Robert Egan knows the rewards of that kind of hard work. As VP of IT at paper maker Boise Cascade Corp., Egan champions the company's core value of "do things simply." Ten years ago, Boise's IT department toiled assiduously to create an application development environment in which all systems--including inventory, order entry, marketing, and sales--employed the same clean design, which allows apps to move easily from one platform to another, and the same underlying technology, IBM's DB2 database and the Cobol programming language. Because of the elegance of the system, Boise Cascade's IT staff can easily modify it--such as by adding a Web interface to let customers directly place orders, check inventory, and review invoices--to make it simple to use. "Attention to details pays off," Egan says.

In some instances, attaining technological simplicity requires trade-offs, in which users accept less functionality or change the way they work. "People want simplicity, but they also want power and configuration; it's an inherent conflict," says Hal Varian, dean of the University of California's School of Management and Systems. Deploying SAP's enterprise software, for example, would be less problematic if companies used the ERP system exactly as the vendor provided without configuring it to specific needs. But doing so requires concessions, sometimes major ones.

Chart 1 That's something West Group is discovering as it deploys SAP R/3 this year. The Eagen, Minn., legal publisher had to change the way it records revenue from long-term subscribers; the traditional method doesn't conform to work rules present in SAP. To keep its traditional method would have required costly modifications to the software. Instead, West Group changed the way it recognizes revenue. "In the end, you're better off to change the business rules than the system," senior VP of customer operations Ron Boller says.

A growing number of companies--both inside and outside the technology industry--have adopted procedures to make the systems they create simple, or at least less complex. One approach is through usability science, in which vendors recruit users at the beginning of the development process to help shape new systems or products (see story, "Remember The User's Point Of View"). To attract more business from law firms, Microsoft hosted two dozen lawyers and legal aides at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters as it began to develop Office XP, the next version of its productivity suite, due out later this year. The Microsoft Legal Advisory Council played a key role in creating a new feature, the task pane, a window within a window that lets users perform such tasks as reformatting text fonts without having to use the toolbar, says Microsoft Office XP product manager Lisa Gurry. "We brought them to our campus so we can learn what to do better," she says.

An emerging technique for dealing with the complexity inherent in very large systems or business processes is to employ simulation software based on complexity theory, which relies on numerical simulations that incorporate genetic algorithms, synthetic neural networks, and even lessons from natural systems such as ant colonies to produce efficient solutions for complex production, scheduling, and logistics systems (see story, "Behavior Change For Supply Chain").

Chart 2 Whether in the mechanics of IT or in processes of business, a key element of simplicity is a focus on basics. Amazon.com's success in attracting customers is based on its focus on fundamentals: letting Web-site visitors promptly find a book, pay for it, and quickly get out. Highly touted features such as personalization, in which Amazon.com software suggests other books to buy, are valuable but not the most important factor.

The basics are these: Complexity is wasteful, stressful, and expensive; simplicity is efficient, cost-effective, and productive. That should be a compelling enough business case for anyone using or selling computer technology. Just ask David Gelernter--if he ever gets his PC to work right.