It’s nice to know that IT Simplification is happening in other shops, not just Microsoft. 

Citigroup announced that they will be cutting a billion dollars from their expenses, and a large part of that will be IT simplification.

 Excerpt:

The company will:

Continue to rationalize operational spending on technology. Simplification and standardization of Citi’s information technology platform will be critical to increase efficiency and drive lower costs as well as decrease time to market. Examples of this are: consolidation of data centers; improved capacity utilization of technical assets and optimizing global voice and data networks; standardizing how the company develops, deploys and runs applications; and maximizing value by limiting the number of software vendors to operate at scale.

In Microsoft, we are pursuing simplification, although I can’t say if we will save anywhere near that much money.  I don’t believe we are quite that screwed up ;-).  On the other hand, one downside to working for a company that writes software… we have software.  LOTS of it.  For a company of our size, we have way too much of it.

And that is where I come in.  In Enterprise Architecture, and in our own Simplification initiative, I am one of the ‘noisemakers’ for simplification.  I honestly believe, and I back my words with works, that if EA is going to truly affect the bottom line of the company, we will do it through two mechanisms: agility and simplification. 

That’s my scorecard.