Technology is supposed to help simplify transactions and increase the speed of doing business, but often that is not the way it works

While technology certainly can speed things up, it also can impede progress. A company can become so tightly bound to any given technology that it loses its agility. Change then becomes a difficult, slow march. As for the idea that technology reduces complexity, nothing could be further from the truth. Integrating all the various and sundry systems that are supposed to simplify business operations is a complex task in and of itself. Then there is the need for ongoing maintenance and periodic modifications to adapt the systems to current business requirements -- which tend to change more rapidly than the systems that support them. Major IT leaders, including IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems, are stepping up to the plate, developing autonomic-computing systems that are designed to simplify the management -- and ratchet up the responsiveness -- of enterprise technology solutions. Autonomic computing will allow IT workers to "redefine the way they do their job ... by the work that's required to run the business," Barel remarked. Much of an admin's job currently involves keeping a system up and running; there is usually little focus on operations that could add value to the business beyond that critical function.