The complexity of an IT system is directly correlated to its chance of failure, maintains Roger Sessions, CTO of ObjectWatch. A system that costs less than $750,000 may well succeed, but a system over $2 million is likely to fail, Sessions argues in a lengthy interview with NetworkWorld's John Dix.

"Systems are getting larger and larger and they're already to the point where they have a very high probability of failure," Sessions says. "So we have a cycle. The cost of the system goes up, the cost of the failures goes up, and the chances of success drop. As the chances of success drop, the cost of the system goes up more. And as the cost of the system goes up more, the failure rate increases."

Sessions obviously advocates small systems, although they can create a new set of complications. His company was recently granted a patent for an anti-complexity methodology, Simple Iterative Partitions, which aims to simplify business and IT systems. Business processes have to be simplified if IT is going to be, he says.

Breaking a large system down into smaller systems reduces the complexity and improves the chance of success, but at the same time it creates new complexities in terms of the dependencies between the systems. Sessions' methodology aims for the optimal balance between the two types of complexities.

For more:
- see this interview with Roger Sessions at NetworkWorld

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