Getting Back to Simplicity

The era of simple living has long gone from our lives. In our parents’ generation, a normal middle-class family in India lived very simply. My parents raised 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment in Mumbai, without a car, or a vacation that involved travelling more than a 100 miles from home. Yet they were extremely happy and content. We, as a generation, have made a choice to complicate our lives in many ways.

Today’s Technology environment sometimes mirrors this complexity. Corporations have built complex application landscapes that are hard to maintain, expensive to change and sometimes very ineffective at getting the right information at the right time to enable decisions.

I recently watched a speech by Steve Jobs, who talked about simplicity as a core value and the challenge to get there. He had a couple of interesting thoughts:

• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

• You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple

In my career, I have seen many CIOs who have tackled application complexity in different ways. The most effective ones had a few things in common:

• They took time to understand their landscape well

• They listened to their customers about what was working and what was not

• They set clear direction and metrics to reduce complexity

• They didn’t just add new systems - they replaced old ones

• They measured outcomes and held themselves accountable

Can we start a conversation about bringing simplicity back into our organizations? I would love to hear some examples of organizations that have done this well.

Raghu Raghuraman - July 2015