We’ve all heard of the KISS principle, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid. It can apply to many areas of life, as I’m sure we’ve all seen. When you make things overly complicated, it just introduces more places for things to go wrong.

I was reminded of this while working at a client’s site last week. The technical support provider prior to my company had done some… shall we say, interesting… things to a laptop, which rendered a critical business application nearly useless. And the fact of the matter is that the changes that had been made had no real benefit.

This left me thinking about why technology people do things the way they do. my experience has taught me that too often, techie types love to make things complicated. I don’t know if they’re trying to impress colleagues, if they’re trying to make things look impressive for the client, or if they have another motive. Or maybe they honestly think that theirs is the best way to do something.

When you apply this to the business environment though, it can really introduce difficulties for continuity. By this I mean, what happens of the current tech support provider is sick, or is otherwise away for an extended absence? In a complicated environment, the slightest fault in a computer system or process can have a serious repercussions. And then who’s going to fix it? More importantly, who is going to know how to fix it?

In life and in business, we try to not to make things overly complicated. This is a lesson that many computer people can, and maybe should, learn. In most cases, small and medium sized business managers should be able to understand the computer systems that are in place for their companies. Maybe not the details of how they run, and probably not the code that drives it all, but at least the basics of how the pieces relate to one another.

I’ve actually heard a tech person tell a business manager “It’s complicated… I don’t think you’d understand it”. Personally, I think that’s garbage. If your systems are so complicated that you don’t understand them, it may be time to start asking questions along the lines of “how can we simplify this?”.

A good tech support provider can help you understand what you have and how it works, so that you can make informed business decisions about your technology. And then you can stop worrying, at least about one aspect of your business.