When it comes to new tech, there’s no avoiding the complexity trap

Every time a new technology comes down the pike, CIOs are urged to adopt quickly, but even if the tech looks compelling like, say GenAI, it seems there is always a corresponding level of complexity when it comes to actually implementing that latest shiny new thing. That is partly due to the slow pace of change inside large organizations, and partly to structural complications.

We’ve seen it over and over, whether we are talking about the shift to the cloud or the adoption of Kubernetes or modern DevOps. There are always going to be sticking points, some human and some technology, and it’s rarely an all or nothing proposition. It’s more of a transition over time, putting one foot in front of the other, and hoping the funding and the drive to change doesn’t dry up.

As every CIO knows, part of the challenge of implementing something like GenAI is far more than simply finding vendors, launching a proof of concept and scaling the projects that work (or at least trying to) There are lots of steps and obstacles to get there. Large organizations move slowly.

As Matt Asay, who runs Developer Relations at MongoDB, pointed out in September in an opinion piece in InfoWorld, even after almost 20 years, we still have a range of implementation strategies around how to run infrastructure, and this usually involves some combination of private data centers and multiple cloud vendors. 

“However much we may want to pretend there are absolutes about enterprise IT (“everyone is moving to the cloud”), the foundational principle of enterprise IT strategy always comes down to two words: It depends,” he wrote.

He means it depends on your organization’s unique needs. A startup is going to be cloud native, but a big bank with years of legacy systems is never going to be all cloud. There’s simply too much regulatory pressure and technical complexity involved. So yes, it depends.

And the fact is no matter how much the marketing departments may talk about modernization and increasing competitiveness and so many other buzzwords to get you interested, it’s still much harder to implement substantive changes inside large organizations than it would appear.

There’s also the pesky people problem. One consultant told me recently that the biggest obstacle to organizational change is that people are always going to look out for their own self-interest, and any technology, no matter how good it is for the organization, may not align with every individual’s interests. In fact, many times it won’t, at least in the short term.

Conversely, the organization itself can be the blocker. All of the people who are designed to protect the organism that is a company – from legal to compliance to HR to IT – are probably going to react negatively at first to any change that involves risk. It’s the nature of the business. And let’s be clear, all change, but especially meaningful change, involves some risk.

At the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in May, Akira Bell, CIO at Mathematica, said IT at least needs to be a facilitator of new technology inside the company. “We cannot and don’t want to be ‘the agents of no,’ to tell everybody what they can and cannot do, but what we can do is make sure people understand the responsibility they have as actors and users of these tools,” Bell said. 

That means CIOs and their security counterparts, CISOs, need to walk a fine line between encouraging change that brings real benefit to the company, while still making sure that things that are essential to the business are still running, and the company’s operation is not being put at risk. 

It’s never going to be an easy balancing act, but it’s essential to find that sweet spot. One way to do that is not think of it as organizational change, at least for the short term. Start small with an easy project that can show value (or not) and go from there. Prove and prove again and march forward because the alternative, doing nothing, is not sustainable either.

Photo by Jorgen Hendriksen on Unsplash