IT is getting too clever by half

It seems we are all intimidated by IT to some extent. Business managers shy away from it, technicians teeter on the edge of nervous breakdowns trying to keep up with it, and commentators howl in despair at the never-ending hype and use of unintelligible language.

Recently I looked at software maker Autonomy’s web site. I have long been an admirer of the base technology –­ it could find meaning in various information sources without a lot of fuss, and at a reasonable cost. Today, Autonomy resembles one of those container ships that looks as if it will capsize any moment.

While I understand the company needs to expand its product range to increase revenues and satisfy shareholders, there comes a point when the whole thing becomes meaningless and too burdensome to understand. Hand in hand with this will be projects that are massively overambitious, with returns that can never be measured.

Of course, this is not just true of Autonomy. Every six months I receive an email from a good friend of mine who was recruited in 2004 for a six-month period, to work on an online retail system for a well-known retailer. He is still there, and his periodic emails always start with: “Thank God for bloatware extending my contract.”

Bloatware in this context is Enterprise Java ­ – well beyond the understanding of any single individual, and serving the useful purpose of keeping hundreds of thousands of programmers employed on ballooning projects around the world.

The IT industry is shooting itself in the foot. The backlash to all this is already happening – ­ albeit in a piecemeal manner. At the simplest level, limited-functionality, pre-configured PCs are becoming popular because they do much of what people want for a fraction of the price (look at Asus’s Eee PC). Businesses, on the other hand, are watching the development of cloud computing as a possible way out of the high-cost, overly complex IT that is beyond the understanding of mere mortals.

The irony in all this is that our über-sophisticated IT may well be increasing our information costs. The only reason companies invest in IT is to try to reduce information costs ­ – we seem to have lost sight of this fact.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence that a revolt is under way. Only a few days ago, I had a conversation with a sales manager who said his firm had reverted to using spreadsheets for much of its contact management. The sophisticated CRM systems it had been using had become too unwieldy. Spreadsheets don’t sound like a good idea to me – ­ but it illustrates the frustration people are feeling.

For those who feel that every organisation other than their own is using sophisticated IT to realise breathtaking benefits, here is the reality. The CIO of a supermarket chain told me that after two years of trying to integrate the supply chain, most business was still done by passing around bits of paper.

Users of enterprise search technologies report that the enterprise will never be searchable ­ – there is just too much private (and valuable) information sitting on PCs and in obscure systems that use strange data formats. Service-oriented architectures typically fail to provide services and degrade into expensive mechanisms for providing limited interoperability between systems. And so on.

I am sure that there is some organisation somewhere that lives up to the glossy images we find in supplier brochures ­ – where everything is under control, and senior management look on approvingly as some smart, attractive, thirty-something professionals adjust a few parameters in the business performance management system. It’s just that I’ve never come across such a thing ­ – and neither will you.

Martin Butler is founder of IT analyst Martin Butler Research