Although automation's huge increases in productivity promised to eradicate the problem, corporate growth eventually caught up with the capacity of automation and variability re-established itself, this time in the more difficult to manage IT department. Since individual efforts had failed, companies with like objectives combined their efforts and developed standards to reduce variability, but the standards proved no more capable of reducing variability than automation had. Variability is not often discussed because it masquerades as complexity. Products, business processes, and engineering systems that become too complex to manage become the targets of simplification schemes. Experts are brought in to streamline processes.
Programs are consolidated.
Efforts are prioritized and everywhere fat is trimmed. If desperate enough, a company will even try to downsize its way out of complexity, selling businesses that become too complicated to manage, and, therefore, unprofitable. Unfortunately, attempting to deal with variability by attacking complexity only treats the symptom, not the underlying cause. And because the science that seeks to manage complexity propagates its own methods, processes, and engineering systems, it is ultimately self-defeating. But that is only half of the story.