Roger Sessions, CTO of ObjectWatch, provides some controversial views on what he sees as a looming meltdown of IT systems, brought on by out-of-control complexity. In an interview with NetworkWorld’s John Dix, he issues a warning, and even discusses the role of service oriented architecture.
IT projects will see more success as smaller, bite-size chunks
Perhaps we should call it “Session’s Law”: “the larger and more expensive an IT project is, the more likely it is to fail. A system that costs less than $750,000 “has a good chance of succeeding,” but a system or project exceeding $2 million “has less than a 50 percent chance of succeeding… by the time it gets much larger than that, the chances of success drop to near zero.”
For a wealth of insights on classic examples, as well as how to avoid IT project failures, check out the site of my colleague Michael Krigsman.
“Most failures are in the $2 million to $4 million range,” says Sessions. In the interview, he plugs a methodology he and his company developed, but the gist of his argument is that systems projects will see a higher chance of success if they’re kept in smaller pieces.
Sessions makes sense, and major projects and processes are better off served up as bite-sized chunks. There’s nothing new about the “chunking” concept, of course — Henry Ford broke automobile assembly down into chunks when he mastered the assembly line. That was the beginning of chunking of production processes.
We saw the chunking of operational or office-based processes with the advent of the computer. When I was director with the Administrative Management Society in the late 1980s and 1990s, the chunking of white-collar and administrative tasks into more standardized and automated tasks (word processing, reporting, database management) was sweeping through organizations.
Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, and author of Thriving on Chaos, and my favorite, Liberation Management, talked about chunking as a strategy for breaking up complex tasks and projects into manageable components. Now, we are talking about the chunking of software itself. This seems to be part of a very inevitable and natural revolution, since software has reached a state of complexity far beyond the ability of any individual, team of individuals, or vendor to manage its development and upkeep.
And, service-oriented architecture is the process of breaking applications into bite-size chunks to be delivered when and where they are needed. The question is — can we achieve simplicity by breaking down complex software operations into manageable, bite-size chunks? Or will things end up as brittle as the CORBA (Component Object Request Broker Architecture) efforts of the past decade?
Interestingly, in the interview, Sessions talks about the role of SOA in IT complexity, observing that companies have tended to build SOAs though arbitrary “decompositional design,” versus a more predictable mathematical approach. It’s this randomness that sinks many SOA efforts, he says.
The bottom line is big systems have become too unwieldy.
