Here is an interesting article, "The Simplicity Thesis," by Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box. In this article, the author calls for attacking a complex problem and producing the simplest solution. He gives many interesting examples of products you may be familiar with that meet his Simplicity Thesis. You won't have far to go to find equally compelling examples of complicated solutions to complex problems. Think about how many features you use regularly in your favorite piece of software, and then compare that with the number of features actually available.
At the University of Minnesota, we are having intense discussions about aligning IT. IT at the University is highly decentralized, with IT units and staff on all campuses, in most colleges, and in many administrative departments. When any one of us comes up with a solution to a problem, how simple is it? Often it starts out pretty simple, but then we encounter security regulations, audit requirements, compliance issues, integration with other systems, and user training. When we all do our own thing, good as those things might be, what does that do to our IT ecosystem? The complexity of IT solutions as a whole is huge. Would we benefit by simplifying?
Aligning and simplifying does not always mean centralizing. We have all seen how a centralized solution, which must meet many needs, can become very complex. And it can also take a long time to implement. And in the end, it might not meet the simple need we started with.
Alignment is being defined as we work on this project, and I sure hope we come up with a definition and a set of practices that meet Levie's Simplicity Thesis.
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