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Discover how EY's technology transformation team can help your business fully align technology to your overall purpose and business objectives.
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Excessive complexity strains resources, increases costs and hampers performance. Conversely, oversimplified landscapes limit flexibility, agility, and may lead to missed opportunities. By actively managing complexity, organizations can optimize resource allocation, make efficient decisions, and align their IT investments with business strategy. This, in turn, means they are positioned to increase productivity, foster innovation, adapt to emerging technologies, and gain a competitive edge.
Identifying, understanding, and measuring drivers of IT complexity and their interdependencies are important steps in detecting root-causes of unintended complexity. Such insight / knowledge allows IT leaders to assess the broader impact of each driver, identify potential cascading effects and develop comprehensive strategies to address and manage complexity holistically across the organization rather than addressing drivers in isolation.
A key consideration when addressing IT complexity is that IT alone cannot steer complexity – the business must take an equal share in responsibility for this strategic endeavor.
A dual approach to measure IT complexity – quantitative and qualitative
Measuring drivers of IT complexity can be approached both in a quantitative and in a qualitative way, depending on the specific aspects that are being evaluated.
An assessment combining both quantitative and qualitative measurements allows organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of IT complexity, considering both objective metrics and perspectives from consumers and stakeholders. An outside view and robust methodology can help provide the insights needed for a holistic assessment that enables organizations to identify areas of improvement, prioritize actions and develop effective strategies for managing and reducing complexity.
Assessment results can also serve as a baseline for future complexity evaluations, so organizations can track improvement progress over time and measure their complexity management efforts effectively.