The Power Of Simplicity

One thing I have noticed common with many people is that they have a feeling that Complex is better. I have witnessed this in  a corporate environment. I have seen a BSS (Business Support System) and OSS (Operation Support System) being developed for my company. As the things evolved, each of these have a very complex nature. I have seen that BSS being more complex and difficult to handle. It is providing more information than needed and and expects people who are working on such systems to cope with such a system.

The irony of this approach is that new people are coming into the system, they try to learn things, and after they have invested considerable amount of time into this – they leave the organization. It is neither useful for them nor for the organization. Another aspect of making things more complex is that, there are Change Requests (CR) flowing each and every day. Once I have told someone about this, but he was of the opinion that this is necessary. I agree that there are complexities arise in every aspect of business systems, but the key is to present things simpler to the end users. The system at the backend can be complex, but that complexity should not translate into the complex and confusing things for the end users.

I still believe that being simple will only increase efficiency. I end this with a quote from Bill Gates – “Automation applied to an efficient system increases the efficiency, and automation applied to an inefficient system increases the inefficiency”. I think that everyone is applying automation to inefficient systems.