Don't Overlook Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

A truck barely too tall to pass through the entrance of New York's Lincoln Tunnel decides to flout the clearance signs and barrel forward anyway, wedging itself under the edifice and snarling traffic for blocks.

A construction and engineering crew is summoned to the debacle. Among its solutions: Blast off a section of the tunnel or dissect the 18-wheeler, both messy and time-consuming options. Then a young girl meandering by with her father suggests letting the air out of the truck's tires-which the workers eventually do, dislodging the obstruction in minutes.

A version of this tale is related in one of the sappier scenes of "Working Girl." But the movie isn't important. The lesson is: The simplest solutions are sometimes the most effective-and the most intrinsically ingenious.

Likewise, IT specialists sometimes spend lots of time concocting elaborate solutions to technology and business problems while eschewing common-sense tactics. Web site's overrun with traffic? Pile on server capacity and bandwidth, and rearchitect the site with load balancing and other performance-enhancing techniques. Need to deliver more reliable IT services to internal customers? Stack the data center with the biggest boxes brimming with CPUs.

Most often, these purchases are necessary. But hurling more capacity at performance, reliability and scalability problems doesn't always fix them. Sometimes, the best solutions marry technological planning and creativity with rudimentary procedures.

For example, in her page 1 story on how weather Web sites are dealing with the traffic demands of a nasty hurricane season, associate editor Christine Zimmerman notes that most sites planned ahead by adding server and bandwidth capacity, augmented by load balancing and caching.

But the likes of Accu-Weather and the Weather Channel also took more elementary steps, like stripping their sites of multicolored maps and reducing the size of banner headlines on the fly to streamline pages and improve performance. Pages downloaded faster. Anxious customers got the information they needed (though still not as quickly as they would have liked). Simple, but effective.

Likewise, not every high-end IT requirement demands the biggest and baddest boxes. Managers are increasingly turning to lower-end, more compact systems to run specific portions of their enterprises, notes senior editor Mitch Wagner in his page 1 story on the subject.

Wagner reports on how online recruiter Net-Temps could have used an expensive Sun server to run its e-commerce site, but instead buys smaller systems that let Net-Temps upgrade incrementally without sacrificing big box functionality.

"If I had bought a refrigerator and filled it with 100 CPUs, I'd be stuck with 100 CPUs," says Kevin Strange, a vice president of IT for Net-Temps. "With the smaller stuff, I can purchase based on demand. I get the benefit of newer technology as I grow."

The upshot? Bigger isn't always better.

Has your IT organization recently solved complex problems with basic technology or processes? Or is the culture at your organization focused on throwing complex solutions at complex problems? Let us know at the address below.

Robert Preston is editor in chief of InternetWeek. He can be reached at rpreston@cmp.com.