Most of the major organizations that I work with have little idea of how fragile their IT architecture is. Most have large numbers of aging core applications that they lack the guts (or resources) to replace. Like the bridges that unexpectedly give way under loads tens of times more than they were designed to carry, these systems are subject to unpredictable behavior. Moreover, the thousands of applications in large organizations are networked in such ways that no one — absolutely no one — can understand the domino effect of any specific failure. But there is good news: The current depression we’re in means that IT groups in most large organizations are going to have limited …

Read more