Managing IT Complexity in the Manufacturing Industry – An Agenda for Action

Abstract

Growing information systems (IS) often come along with grow-ing IT complexity, because of emerging rag rug landscapes. This development causes rising IT costs and dependencies, which hin-der the maintenance and expansion of the IS landscape. This ar-ticle outlines the current research on published and presented methods to manage the rising IT complexity in a literature re-view. Because definitions of "IT complexity" vary a lot in litera-ture, this paper also includes a definition of the term. In addition to that, it delivers a presentation of the used research methodol-ogy. Subsequently, it presents the findings in literature, high-lights the research gap and – based on the literature analysis – presents the steps that need to be taken. A discussion of the re-sults and a summary complete the article.

Keywords

• Platform
• Literature Review
• IT complexity
• Information Systems
• Simplicity
• Re-duction
• IS Landscape