The Writing On IT's Complexity Wall

The past years have seen IT organizations struggle with issues of service development, deployment, and delivery. Forrester believes that these issues are directly linked to the increased complexity of IT, born from technology's diversity and exponential growth. The necessary balance between managing existing services and the ability to deploy new services has been, in many cases, desperately skewed toward the former. We believe that this is a clear sign that these IT organizations are close to the point where their ability to take on new projects will be nullified by the workload generated to keep existing systems alive. As in any typical queuing system reaching its saturation point, any increase in workload would result in an unpredictable response time. We also believe that all organizations will eventually reach this breaking point and that the only remedy will be a radical rethinking of IT management and of the tools that support IT management. These tools will actually abstract IT complexity to make it controllable and manageable.