Complexities and complications are two different poles that are often misunderstood. While the former one deals with the systems and structures that communicate with each other, the latter is all about the system that doesn’t communicate at all. With the advent of Information Technology, complications in every industry and even the people are slowly moving towards complexities from complications. The sophisticated the infrastructure, the scope for more complexities. Do these complexities impact the decision making? If yes, they are we in need of reducing the growing complexity that’s impacting the decision making? Read on to know more.
The argument that complex systems lead to better decision making is quite an old one, and to establish the same, Anirban from IIM Calcutta has submitted a thesis. An experiment was conducted as a part of the thesis. At least 414 executives took part in apparently 91 strategic sessions. With the help of a simulation software, business complexity was tweaked. The results were astonishing. Rational decision making was highly impacted followed by political decision making and intuitive decision making. The study even mentioned that managers played a crucial role in the decision-making policy.
A few CEOs, on the other hand, said that IT complexity would increase with the time as systems are usually built to handle one thing at a time, and as the need increases, they would be expanded. The results would always be stressful in a complex IT system, added some CEOs who also mentioned that systems overlap and hamper the innovation, which in turn affects the decision-making process.
It is the need of the hour for companies to put a check to the IT complexities. Experts opined that IT complexities can be reduced by following some of these tips:
- Removing unwanted tasks: Creating too many separate tasks and individual signoffs even for petty things can take a toll on the time and productivity. Bandwidth can be increased by removing minor tasks
- Prioritize: It is essential for the companies to continuously prioritize things, know what customers want and work towards it
- Eliminate chain emails: Employees should speak up especially when they are confusing chain of emails. It is advisable for enterprises to have a 360-degree cloud-based project management system that would give overall visibility of the work in real-time.
Conclusion: As complexities are growing in abundance in all enterprises with special reference to the IT industry, managers should focus more on simplification of complexities. It is only when complexities are in check, efficient decision-making will be achieved.