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Why have FO when there’s no MO?
If you are a business leader in 2026 trying to deal with AI, you are surrounded by fear on all sides. Analysts, investors, vendors and the media are all telling you that if you don't invest in AI, you should fear being left behind. At the same time, lawyers, risk professionals, privacy advocates and employee representatives are telling you you should fear AI harming your staff, your customers and your company's reputation.
Fear is rarely helpful in an enterprise setting. I once knew a large corporation which was desperate to move to cloud because they feared that their aging data centres could fail at any moment. But, after spending many millions to get their cloud environments ready, they wouldn't move their data because they feared security breaches. Fear drove double cost and double complexity.
Complexity and simplicity are friends
How many applications is too many? 100? 200? 1,000? 7,000?
I have worked for many different organisations with different numbers of applications. Whatever the numbers, though, they all had one thing in common: somebody, somewhere thought that we had too many applications.
I have always found this belief puzzling. We build applications because we believe that they have value (otherwise we wouldn’t put so much effort into writing those business cases). We celebrate our success when we implement them. And then we record their existence in our great big list of applications, lament that we have so many, and wish that we had fewer. Is there any other field of endeavour where what we have built moves so quickly from asset to liability (whatever our accounting rules say)?
I believe that people worry about the number of applications in their estate because of an inherent fear of complexity, and because the number of applications is a visible signal of complexity. They perceive that their technology is becoming too costly, too slow and too risky, and they also see that these factors rise in sync with the number of applications. The more stuff they have, the harder it seems to get