The gap between being rational and being informed

I was talking to a trusted colleague yesterday.   I was explaining that in almost all cases, I find IT people that would agree that systems should be high quality, highly available, and deliver the performance that the business expects.   If there was an event, they would want to be able to know that it was coming and rapidly diagnose the root cause from information provided as part of end-to-end application/system monitoring and configuration management information. 

Organizations are filled with intelligent, talented, rational IT people.   Yet, when they implement systems, there are often limitations to the above stated goals.  

I think there are two root causes for the disconnect between the goals and reality.   One of the root causes is hard to fix and the other is easy.   The hard to fix root cause is that we implement complex systems in complex ecosystem.   Systems are getting more complex with more moving parts as we move toward SOA, more vitualization, clouds, and more non-functional requirements in areas like privacy and security.   This is coupled with new and improved budget constraints and the age-old alignment questions between IT and the business.  

The easy to fix root cause is that often, limitations in IT's ability to manage systems is not communicated. 
I have seen many organizations that have invested in excellent application and infrastructure management tools and rapidly implement a portion of what they need.   Unfortunately this is coupled with limited investment in internal transfer of knowledge on how to care and feed management systems.   And the release management process is not modified to ensure that changes to applications are coupled with changes to monitoring and management.   Often, those individuals that do know how to make changes move on and the internal knowledge gets diluted further.   As the visibility to manage applications decreases, this is not communicated.  The result is that those that invested in tools to support the goals listed above do not know that things have changed.   They remain intelligent, rational IT professions. But now some of their decisions become impacted by an information gap.  This is the gap between being rational and being informed.