UpTrajectory Review
CIO Magazine runs a first-person account from a consultant who once ran one of the country's largest cloud and managed services practices. His argument: the gnarliest IT environments he has walked into were not designed badly. They accreted. Each vendor, cloud region, and point solution arrived through a defensible decision made under deadline, budget, or compliance pressure. Twenty years later, nobody holds a map of the whole estate. The piece opens his three-phase model of how complexity builds, starting with the accumulation phase he describes here: SaaS added because a business unit needed it fast, a new cloud region stood up for data sovereignty.
For a small-business operator, this hits close to home even if you have forty seats instead of four thousand. You probably made the same reasonable calls: the accounting app one employee demanded, the backup service bolted on after a scare, the industry-specific tool a client contract required. You lack a procurement office and a change-control board, so buying stays distributed across whoever feels the pain. The author notes that the heaviest-complexity shops are often the fastest growers, not the worst decision-makers. Growth itself manufactures sprawl, and small firms grow in lurches, not smoothly.
The genuinely useful observation is that complexity is a byproduct of success, not failure. That reframing matters because most IT commentary treats sprawl as incompetence and prescribes discipline nobody actually applies. We are skeptical of one thing the excerpt implies: that the pattern unfolds in recognizable phases. Nobody experiences it as phases, the author admits, which makes the framework feel tidier in a magazine than in your server closet. The lived version is a slow fog. Naming phases helps a consultant sell an assessment; it helps you less when you are inside phase one and cannot see phase three.
The second-order cost lands unevenly. Large enterprises absorb complexity with dedicated staff and compliance teams; a small operator absorbs it personally, in evenings spent reconciling five billing portals and remembering which system holds which customer record. The author flags the real drivers: people, process, and the phrase every auditor loves, 'we need that for compliance.' Those human attachments outlive the technical rationale. Decommissioning a tool means telling a department head no, and most small firms would rather pay the subscription than have that conversation.
Watch for the rest of his three-phase model, which the excerpt cuts off before delivering. If he moves from accumulation to consolidation, the practical question for you is what triggers the shift: a security incident, an audit, a failed integration, or simply a budget line that finally looks absurd. Until then, do one concrete thing this quarter: inventory every recurring IT expense, who requested it, and which requirement it serves. Reasonable decisions deserve a written record. Without one, your successor inherits a mystery, and your margins inherit the bill.
Takeaway: Audit every recurring IT expense this quarter: who requested it, what requirement it serves, and whether both still exist.
Excerpt from the original — CIO Magazine
The most complicated IT environments I’ve worked in weren’t built that way on purpose. They got there through a sequence of reasonable decisions made by reasonable people under real pressure. A cloud provider added because the incumbent couldn’t hit a latency requirement. A point solution brought in because a business unit needed something fast. A managed service layered on when headcount froze. Each one made sense at the time. The problem comes later, when twenty years of reasonable decisions turn into an environment no one has fully stepped back to understand.
The ones carrying the most complexity aren’t usually the ones that made the worst decisions. They’re the ones that grew the fastest, had the most demands on their IT teams or operated in environments where buying was distributed across business units. The complexity is, in a strange way, a byproduct of success. That doesn’t …