“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
– ALAN PERLIS, COMPUTER SCIENTIST
High-level strategic goal and priority in your company is to reduce the complexity in both business and in IT. To achieve this goal business units should start measuring how much any given project corresponds to the increase or reduction of complexity and what is the complexity of given business domain. However, the company has no method to calculate complexity and no process to follow upon it.
Complexity assessment
Before the specific activities that are targeted towards reducing the complexity in certain selected part of the enterprise, we need more detailed information as input to complexity calculation.
This information can be collected through creating and maintaining models of different architecture domains: Business models, Products, Processes, Systems and Services, Organization.These are broad overall complexity parameters, which can further be broken down into a number of sub parameters.
There are many definition of complexity, but complexity definitions typically include parameters like the number of elements and the number of interconnections between these elements. These parameters can be used as minimal set criterion for complexity calculation.
Technique
One dimension to measure complexity of business domain is to measure complexity of IT systems. Several models will help as analytical data for complexity calculation: application catalog per domain and application integration matrices per domain. This gives us number of IT systems and their interconnections.
Counting the same measures before and after the project helps to estimate how any given project corresponds to the increase or reduction of complexity.
Complexity model below visualizes the complexity level of different business domains and estimates complexity level after 2 big cross-domain projects have been completed.
The figure can be easily complemented with table, which shows changed complexity in real numbers and points out the major factors impacting this change.
Value
Short term value of complexity measurement would be to show the “direction” of project portfolio, to verify that we indeed are acting according to the stated high-level strategic goal, and are reducing the complexity.
Long term value of complexity measurement would be to be able actively control activities targeted towards reducing the complexity.