20 IT Mistakes

A good article by Chad Dickerson on common IT mistakes.

I especially like these:

19. Violating the KISS principle

Doug Pierce, technical architect at Datavantage, says that violating the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) principle is a systemic problem for IT. Pierce says he has seen “hundreds of millions” of dollars wasted on implementing, failing to implement, or supporting solutions that are too complex for the problem at hand. According to Pierce, although complex technologies such as CORBA and EJB are right for some organizations, many of the organizations using such technologies are introducing unnecessary complexity.

This violation of the KISS principle directly contributes to many instances of project failures, high IT costs, unmaintainable systems, and bloated, low-quality, or insecure software. Pierce offers a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery as a philosophical guide for rooting out complexity in IT systems: “You know you’ve achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”

20. Being a slave to vendor marketing strategies

When it comes to network devices, databases, servers, and many other IT products, terms such as “enterprise” and “workgroup” are bandied about to distinguish products, but often those terms mean little when it comes to performance characteristics.

Quite often a product labeled as a “workgroup” product has more than enough capacity for enterprise use. The low cost of commodity hardware -- particularly when it comes to Intel (Profile, Products, Articles)-based servers -- means that clustering arrays of cheap, workgroup hardware into an enterprise configuration is often more redundant and scalable than buying more expensive enterprise servers, especially when it comes to Web apps.