The Cost of Complexity

September 27, 2007 from CIO Insight – “Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises?" That's the excellent question posed in an article on the Web site of the MIT Sloan Management Review by consultant Cynthia Rettig. Her answer is a forceful but thoughtful yes. And the upshot is that it's preventing companies from being flexible and IT organizations from being the force for innovation they could and should be.

And Rettig thinks the SOA, like ERP, will fail to solve the problem: The hallmark of SOA is its ability to claim to build modular business processes. However, "software does not work as Legos do," she writes."

180 View – SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) gets a lot of hype. A good chunk of my (Michael Burns) career was in software development, and we called SOA reusable code then. We tried hard to make code reusable but the more generic we made it, the more complicated it became. At a certain point, we gave up and kept it or tried to keep it simple. I have been thinking that perhaps I don’t know enough about the great software tools available today and should be less cynical about SOA. But I am not the only one who is skeptical about SOA.