K.M.S.S. > Keep Me Simple and Stupid

K.M.S.S. Keep Me Simple and Stupid
photo: Freedigitalphotos

We should have our solutions and offering simple. But we, the ones working in the IT industry, can't always have that luxury. The day you're not learning new things and following where we're heading, you're out. On the other hand we in the IT industry easily get blinded by the products and solutions and services and especially with the abstract things like 'cloud' and 'virtual'. We even have now virtual people working in our companies, virtual roles, virtual teams. Wonder who's going to get their paychecks? Which reminds me of the old saying 'Employee is pretending to work while the employer is pretending to pay the salary' :) Wonder how much this is true with the virtual roles...

Back to the subject :) K.M.S.S. (Keep Me Simple and Stupid), which is a twist from K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple and Stupid) has an important message behind it. If we in the industry think too complicated, then our solutions and offering will be too complicated and they will not meet the customer needs. Customers don't need complicated nor multi flexible solutions that are capable of doing everything IF needed. When taking a step back from the IT (as a tool) to the Business (as a master - meaning customer), we come to the fact that what business needs are not that complicated. You just have to look it from the business perspective. What do the business need to get certain business objectivities accomplished. And we should avoid the lego block way of thinking on product level, that 'if I have this product X then the Product Y would fit wonderfully and bring me all these new features which let me do what ever is needed.' Well, the fact is that the business who bought the IT as a tool in the first place, does not need to be ready to do 'everything'. That's the important part to realize. Even if they need to be agile it doesn't mean there is a need for an IT environment that grows independently without any real connection to the business. And that's not very uncommon actually.

Some years (actually closer to 10) ago there was a clear movement getting IT managers or IT directors into the board rooms to get that connection between business and IT. But my gut feeling is that we've come back from that and more and more IT has been left on it's own into reactive mode as from the CxO point of view it's probably often so complicated and gets so technical that it's easier to bypass it in a way. Leave it alone :)

This needs to be corrected. We as members of IT industry need to make things simpler. First for ourselves and by that we're able to simplify it also for the customers. We need more business thinking and less technical thinking to meet the user expectations better in the future. Things might get in a way more complicated when everything goes virtualized into cloud, but we need to be able to better translate that stuff under the hood into what really matters. Being a passenger for a taxi shouldn't mean you should be able to first understand how the engine in the taxi works and what kind of replacement parts or additional options you can buy for it.  There was another kind of task the passenger had in mind when hiring the taxi and that was getting from place A to B :) This is many times easy to forget.

In the end it always falls down into us, the people, not the technology. Gene Marks writes about this in Forbes article from the CRM application perspective, that is there to help, but if not understood, implemented, sold and used right, will not serve anyone as it was meant to.