Complexity? It is everywhere!

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Martijn Veldkamp

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August 4, 2023

All of us Architects have experience with our different customers and their complex and bulky application landscapes. And the numerous challenges that they cause.

We are not allowed to change or update the MiddleWare because it is so critical for our day to day operations

Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114814/

Next to high maintenance costs and the reduced agility a complex application landscape also brings it’s own level of integration difficulties. To add to the problem pile, there is an higher chance of security risks and it is harder to stay compliant. (the ever increasing regulatory compliancy creep is not helping). And let’s not forget our own resistance to change.

This all leads to organisational inertia
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Not every solution stems from the problem

I’ve often seen and even participated in application rationalisation programs. You take stock of all existing applications and their interdependencies. You catalog functional capabilities. You evaluate the performance and resource consumption. You identify critical and non-critical applications. And these create a prioritised list that needs to be verified with the target state architecture. This leads to an overview and input for a large change program.

Albert Einstein reportedly said that if he had an hour to solve a problem, he’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

Application Rationalisation is not the best answer for complex and bulky application landscapes. It is an IT answer that does not take the Customer Journey in consideration.

How you frame your problem will influence how you solve it

Who doesn’t want to become a future-oriented, proactive and a easy to work with business partner?

If you take increasing the Customer Experience as the main goal and then look at simplifying the Customer Journey you have great starting point. This works wonders for both external and internal customers.

With this end goal in mind we have to approach with Systems Thinking. We need to make sense of the complexity of the application landscape by looking at it in terms of wholes
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