What about the increasing complexity...

Many of your suggestions on how to safegaurd the analytic core in a down economy (Outsourcing, Virtualizing, new technologies) lead to additional complexity in the IT environment. This just continues to add complexity to environments that have been growing in complexity over the past 10 years. As SOA, BI, and the merging of older (mainframe/batch) systems with newer (web 2.0/mashups/J2EE) technologies added inter-relationships that are often difficult to discern let alone understand, so does outsourcing BI and virtualizing systems add inter-relationships. Systems that in the past had no dependencies are now sharing core resources (CPU/Memory/Disk). We know that these initiatives allow us to be more capable of handling change in the environment, but we often dont think about how they add complexity. I believe that the only way to handle this increasing complexity is to do the same things we did for business data when it became more complex: let the computers help us make sense of what is happening through analytics.

David Wilson

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