Technology ecosystems, a complex network of interconnected systems, have formed sometimes for all the right reasons, but a lot of times to fix problems created by badly designed systems. The most recent mobile app ecosystems came about because of conscious decisions made in the  original design itself – realizing that they themselves did not have the bandwidth to provide all the possible functionalities, companies like Apple and Google created frameworks and allowed a community of developers to develop mobile apps for their platforms. In case of Apple, this is a carefully controlled process, whereas in case of Android, it is sort of free for all.

Then you have cases like a poorly designed Windows operating system that gave rise to a multibillion dollar ecosystem for protecting the operating system – virus protection and malware to name a few. And because these systems were originally not designed for the well connected environment we live in, new vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. So, there is a whole ecosystem to protect essentially poorly designed systems!

Reporting and Business Intelligence ecosystems are mixed. The original ERP systems developers designed these systems to be handling large amounts of transactions. As a result these were data black holes and getting the data out from these systems required a complete new way of thinking. So, a badly designed system gave birth to data warehouses that are optimal for reporting. Then the limitations of reporting was realized and this gave birth to a whole new ecosystem called Business Intelligence that allows one to probe the data in real time without having to learn to write code!

The challenge we face is how best to support our community when easy access to several choices exist.

Whether it is individual choice of a mobile app or a choice of a larger system institution-wide, there are very many complicating factors to consider. First and foremost one should establish the answer to “what is the problem that I am trying to solve?” In the excitement, we almost always forget to ask this question. As a result, we have (including me) clutter in our mobile devices or laptops – apps that we downloaded that we rarely use, or data or content we downloaded that we never bother to access. Then, one day we realize that some of these are actually running in the background, eating up valuable resources and sending data somewhere unbeknown to us. Or, they are occupying disk space (though this is becoming less of a concern).

We also sign up to use several systems that we rarely use. Some of these have had data breaches, and it that notification wakes you up to the reality that you signed up at some point and never or rarely used the system. But many of these make it so difficult to get out of that you just give up. I am trying to clean up my subscriptions to things that I don’t use any more. A couple of them have sent me emails about breaches and the need to take action (which I have done). It is then that I realized that at some point I signed up. But, I can’t delete my account. I need to make a phone call. In one case I tried, but waited more than 10 minutes and hung up. These are the “bad” parasites in the ecosystem that doesn’t appear harmful at the get go, but can be a huge nuisance later on.

The technology ecosystems are not much different than the biological equivalent. It comes with both good and bad and we, as users, need to be very careful and judge the essentials, separate the good and the bad.