IT: A crisis of complexity?

A "crisis of complexity" was how Paul Flessner, senior vice-president of Microsoft's Windows Server System division, described it to attendees in his keynote at the vendor's Tech Ed 2003 conference in the US.

Flessner estimated that 60 to 80 percent of an organisation's IT budget was consumed by the ongoing cost of operations.

"This must change," Flessner said. "You don't succeed long as an IT director, manager [or] CIO saying 'no' every time a new capability is requested."

"We have to figure out a way from the inception to the development to the deployment and operations on how we can be more cost effective ... we have to figure out ways up front when we design systems so that we can run them at a lower cost of operation."

Flessner also talked up the interest in Web services, and the common services - such as security - that were needed to ensure it worked properly. "Systems are going to have to talk to each other. We understand that in a world of Web services not everything is going to be built on Windows," Flessner said. "We know the world is heterogeneous, and things have to plug in so our security systems have to talk to each other."

As part of the opening keynote, Microsoft announced plans to invest US$1.7 billion of R&D in its Windows Server System in the next fiscal year, with US$450 million of investment allocated to community-based efforts designed to support IT professionals and developers.

Laws Clause: Vivienne Fisher travelled to Tech Ed 2003 courtesy of Microsoft.