“Beauty is only skin-deep but ugly goes right to the [blank] bone.”
– Billy Connolly, comedian and actor
There is a big problem in IT that I have never seen discussed. It isn’t about how to get systems to work or how to keep them running. It is about how they are built. No, I’m not talking about architecture, although that is crucial to the issue. What I’m talking about is beauty.
Beauty, or its absence, is something that is instantly recognizable in things that people build. And along with beauty you usually find other attributes such as elegance, ease of use, fitness for purpose and efficiency. With ugly, you find none of these things.
In IT, beauty translates as well-architected, well-engineered systems that operate at the highest level of reliability and effectiveness. Ugly IT is defined by the opposite of those attributes: poorly architected, badly engineered collections of spare parts that function poorly.
What’s interesting is that in IT, just as with people, beauty that is purely on the surface is easily identified. Meet a beautiful person and talk to them for a few minutes, and if they’re shallow that will be glaringly obvious. Start trying to use that beautiful Web site and if it is only beautiful on the surface its inner ugliness will be obvious within a few clicks.
This issue has bugged me more recently. Over the last few weeks I’ve been surfing the Web, researching hosting companies and various products and technologies.
Most of the Web sites I’ve seen are pretty good-looking but are awful to use. They have bits missing, they don’t tell the complete story, the layout is illogical, they don’t make it easy to find what you’re looking for, and they don’t give you a reason to buy or even come back.
If you can’t get your customer-facing services right, what must it look like behind the scenes?
Actually, I know what some of them look like. In my alternate existence as a consultant I’ve seen what goes on in real companies, and I know how ugly things can be. I’ve seen server rooms of multimillion-dollar operations that look like they’ve been shaken by a large, violent explosion, and then patched back together by a demented spider spinning a web of Cat 5 cable. I’ve seen IT staff awash in paper and running as fast as they can to reduce the rate at which they slip backwards. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen sunny . . . sorry, I got carried away.
At the beginning of this column I mentioned some of the attributes I would suggest as foundations of IT beauty: elegance, ease of use, fitness for purpose and efficiency. I would argue that elegance is one of most important if not the key component. An elegant IT architecture is comprehensive, doesn’t use more resources than are needed, is robust, and is based on and meets business goals.
But the choices we make to realize our architectures, the services, applications and operating systems we select, are a real problem if we are trying to build beautiful systems. Operating systems in particular are a tough place to find elegance, let alone beauty.
As soon as you dig under the surface of many major software titles you find an ugly tangled pile of compromises that wind up making the systems less elegant and therefore less beautiful.
So, let’s talk about your organization. Do these attributes of beauty, and particularly elegance, apply to your architecture?
You might complain that in most IT shops – and yours in particular – the architecture just grew organically; the mighty oak you struggle with today started out as just a tiny acorn way back when.
When did you last do an architectural review and look for the dead wood that must be cut out to stop the creeping rot of ugly?
Plans for trimming to backspin@gibbs.com and check out the beautiful Gearblog.
