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80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)
A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from maximizing value. From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities. Also that trust and quality issues slow progress, with only 29 percent of respondents having complete trust in the quality of their organization's data. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) say they face unprecedented volumes of data but struggle to generate useful insights from it, estimating that they use only about half (51 percent) of the data they collect or generate. What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.
What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.
So what you are saying, is that over half of all business decisions are based on "gut feelings"?
A lot of outdated tech sits inside I.T. storage closets to gather dust. Most companies don't have a plan to recycle outdated tech.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
On the other hand, a similar percentage of IT Decision Implementers recognize the "new data-driven opportunities" as being buzzword cow-pies that entice the MBAs with no technical skills.
"My ignorance amuses me.."
Are outdated themselves.
And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back. Coincidentally, if you solve that problem the organization gets agile enough to keep up with current standards.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"Data driven opportunities" is a euphemism for "we want to sell YOU the customer".
Nothing new here. It's been that way in every shop I've ever worked in.
Part of the problem is so many people generate worthless data to CYA or to prove how much work they do. Then you have worthless managers that encourage it - because they think the same way.
I don't see this as an IT issue. Its culturally held beliefs from 20-30 years ago before all this new tech existed.
That said, the new tech is so expensive its really hard to see the value when what we're using now is holding up and working the way it was designed. Just because we want flash new things doesn't mean they are better.
That get totally sold on the Cloud, instead of getting a decent infrastructure in place. I've worked at a few places with horrid CRM / Salesforce integration because they'll buy the software and then implement it with cheap coders from India / the Philippines. At the current company I'm at, we had a much better implementation of HPNA and now because of "cost savings" and other factors, like probably some executive being treated to a strip club, we are switching to NCM, which has a Java based front end, lol. Instead of going through putty and figuring things out within a minute, you have to spend a good 3-4 minutes at least going through that clunky piece of crap.
Companies rely on business-stupid people to drive IT. This isn't just in IT, but IT people nowadays don't know anything about the business they are supposed to generate useful information for from all the data they have stored over the years. Back in the day a business analyst was also a programmer and knew the business well. They figured out ways to do things. They worked for a company for 10+ years and most of them have retired out now. Nobody wants a technical BA, or can really even have one any more, because everything is too damned complicated. IT doesn't need new technology, they need an old outdated way of doing things. Like an AS/400 with a bunch of dumb terminals to run a manufacturing company. "Old" tech to solve problems created by new tech.
... is only as out dated as the people working on it. I've taken older systems and set them up to run newer data imports and exports without problems. Granted not all older systems are easily modified but I wonder how many of those old outdated systems are just people wanting the latest and greatest instead of working older bug free tech?
We don't want telemetry and forced updating Windows 10 and we don't want Portless Macs either. Windows 7 will be staying here after January 14 2020 on my computers.
80 percent of IT decision makers say they're ineffective because of someone else's choice, not theirs.
We had the technology to handle terabyte size databases twenty years ago. Data warehouses aren't new. Columnstores and NoSQL don't make data analysis any easier. So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data". This looks like nothing other than a cheap ad for the company mentioned in the article.
In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back. In fact, we leased server hardware and had it replaced at the recommended interval, we had a petabyte disk array, virtualization, and even a mobile telepresence device (not heavily used). We had plenty of tech. What the bosses wouldn't do is hire more people. They were convinced that the solution to any problem was throwing more gigahertz and terabytes at it. But the hard problems we needed to address weren't technological in nature, they were human problems. Last I heard, the department was crumbling and their software solution retired in shambles. But people are expensive, and you have to keep paying them to keep them.
In the place I work now, they've been collecting client usage data for 10 years, but they've never organized or analyzed it. That's what I'm doing there, but again, the barrier to this wasn't technological in nature, it was just that it was never anyone's job to do it.
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This looks like an advertisement masquerading as "news".
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
is a "self service automation specialist"?
I agree. If my organization had access to AI deep learning systems we would be much farther ahead.
Most of the time, the problem is there is no budget set aside for the new tech. Or for the staff training to use new tech. Or to spend on a vendor/partner/consultant to help determine what new tech to use. So isn't that the real issue? If you had the money, you would solve the problem.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
"My ignorance amuses me.."
Based on how many companies seem to enjoy ignorantly building an IT hardware refresh cycle based on hardware failure, I'd say it's more like a "pleasurable torment"...
Which comes as no surprise to most of us, because we've all been pretty sure management just makes shit up as they go.
You could probably replace the average CEO with a magic 8-ball and get the same results.
Outdated tech is keeping companies from selling our data to anyone with a pulse? Hooray for outdated tech!
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... more like 80% of IT decision makers want more money to spend to justify their existence.
IT is the bureaucracy from hell, worse than the DMV and the VA combined.
I'm pretty sure this is a PEBKAC-type problem.
It's not "outdated tech" that's holding you back. It's your inability to replace it with something more flexible. In other words, you did done get yourself locked-in by your vendor or the crud in your own head.
If the decision makers are feeling that way, they should make the decision to replace the outdated tech.
I'm not sure I agree that sticking with working systems and a known set of shortcomings is necessarily worse than trying to implement newer systems that don't have any measurable quality advantage and introduce a unknown set of shortcomings that you get to find out the hard way.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
You know what holds us back? Vendor support, even major enterprise class vendors, has gone to complete hell. Why are we paying bucketloads of money for top-tier level support contracts when what we are getting is next to useless?
A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from maximizing value.
Maximizing IT value or maximizing company value? Those are not necessarily the same thing. Just because you invest heavily in IT does not necessarily mean that those investments will equate to an improvement on the bottom line of the company. It might but it's not a given. There is an old maxim that local maximums often make for global minimums. Having the most efficient IT in the world doesn't matter if the rest of the company operations suffer as a result.
We have to remember that IT is a cost. It is a (very important) tool. It is a means to an end and not an end itself. You invest in IT when it will permit the company to be more profitable. If the cost of upgrading the IT to maximum efficiency exceeds the profits enabled by that upgrade then you don't do it unless there is a strategic imperative forcing you to. And to be fair it's not always clear what the impact of an IT upgrade will be. I've seen them be hugely beneficial but I've also seen them bankrupt companies and of course lots of cases of it having little to no change.
If you want to upgrade the IT in a company the challenge is to make a case for how it will provide an ROI which is ultimately what most business owners actually care about.
Companies are risk averse. That can be a good thing, but taken to extreme it holds them back. There are lots of little startups out there with innovative solutions to real problems. I am building a new kind of data management system and finding early adopters feels like trying to find life on Mars. Everyone wants someone else to take all the risks. They want someone else to test it; to give feedback on features; to devote resources to make the product better. Yet these same companies complain that the only solutions out there are expensive walled gardens when they have only themselves to blame for fewer options.
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So you have outdated 'tech/software' 'holding you back'?
Can you show me the plan you made when you installed said tech and software for it's maintenance / convalescence? Including expected budget for upgrades and replacements in a reasonable and timely fashion?
Did you ensure you would be able to migrate all important data from that proprietary vendor format to whatever the new best thing would be to avoid vendor lock in?
Do you have everything sufficiently documented so that someone else can take over when your expert retires? Did you spend the money and time to do these things right?
NO? That sounds like a MANAGEMENT problem. Would you have done that with little planning with any other kind of company resource? Company vehicles? Buildings? .... hmm... no?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
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If only there were a way for "IT decision makers" to somehow change this situation!
So sad, that dated IT technology is holding them back. You know, perhaps some kind of decision could be made, by, I dunno, some sort of IT management type.
Yes, I know that there is a bit more to it than just an aspiration for better technology. Budgets, upper management, I know the whole drill. It's still a bit too rich for me, that IT decision makers are decrying what is, in effect, a failure to decide or act to change that situation.
Seriously, who else would we hold responsible for this situation? When you get past the inside baseball of corporate politics, the buck stops with those "decision makers". The situation is the way it is because of the actions, or non-actions, of those very decision makers, when viewing them collectively.
Blah blah blah old tech bad blah blah blah new tech good blah blah blah. Oh look, a company that sells a SAAS service says that old tech is bad and new tech is good!
This is such a pathetic self-serving refrain and I am SO sick of hearing it.
"Old" tech does *not* hold you back. Generally speaking, it never has, and it never will.
What *will* hold you back? Poor management will hold you back. Badly implemented technology that leaves you with a big pile of technical debt will hold you back. Hiring people based on buzzword bingo will hold you back.
I know companies who, for example, went all in on Hadoop because it was "new" and "cool" and "let you slice and dice massive amounts of data data with ease". (Their entire dataset was less than 1TB) Less than a year later, and the entire effort has been discarded because the effort required just to maintain the thing was overwhelming compared to the value they were actually getting out of it. They were able to accomplish what they wanted with much less effort using a single simple instance of SQL Server.
The current culture of treating with disdain anything older than 6 months has to be one of the most profoundly idiotic notions to have ever come out of the computer industry. We have become fans of reinventing the wheel over and over, without so much as once thinking about whether there is even a benefit to the effort.
It's one thing to introduce a new technology for realistic, practical reasons, such as you simply don't have the manpower to implement said thing with what you already have. But do NOT just spew junk self-serving surveys that blanket says "you gotta throw out what you got and get this new shiny" because that's a lie and you know it.
Of course, you could always do what the US president does when he blames past presidents for current conditions, which is to make things so unequivocally worse that there's not really anyplace to go but up from there. That any improvement which might be had may not make up for how much worse it was made in interim is beside the point.
That the IT decision makers are generally:
a) beancounters who create this technological debt out of ignorance and generally against the recommendations of their subject matter experts.
or
b) IT people who are knowledgeable enough to avoid this problem, but not powerful enough in the organization to follow through because of the beancounters above them.
None are quite as accurate or valuable as listening to the damn underlings. It's too bad there aren't big conferences or linkedin buzzword bingo surrounding listening to underlings like there are for "big data".
A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from giving money to SnapLogic.
"Data driven" is a buzzword. It's synonymous with "not bullshit". People have been making "data driven" decisions forever.
Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.
ie, buy SnapLogic. SHOCKING!
Also that trust and quality issues slow progress, with only 29 percent of respondents having complete trust in the quality of their organization's data.
Those 29% are idiots then. Complete trust? WTF are they smoking? But this is just a bullshit poll where some people picked a number 1-5.
Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) say they face unprecedented volumes of data but struggle to generate useful insights from it,
ie, the data-driven crazy is mostly bullshit.
Woooo! We have a ton of data! ....now what fucking good is it?
estimating that they use only about half (51 percent) of the data they collect or generate.
That's... actually just fine. No real shocker that the people harvesting data errored on the side of being overzealous. I mean really, what are you supposed to do with the weight of the sysadmins purchasing your routers? Are you trying to find a link between heart-attacks and your customer base? No, you're trying to sell more routers.
What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.
With 25% being based on common sense, 25% being based on what they've always done in the past, and 2% being decided by darts.
More like winning Buzzword Bingo.
Like putting everything "In The Cloud!"
Why?
Just because it was in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal?
Can I have some of whatever they are smoking?
What is holding us back is hyped technology. Not reliable, proven-to-work "outdated" tech.
I recently returned to some web development after many years of absence. Don't want to tell the whole story here, that's maybe for a longer article somewhere, but OMG is the whole environment splintered and incredibly fragile. Half the modules or libraries you need are not maintained any longer because the author has moved on to the newest hype. Almost everything is replaced by something else before it is mature, so most of what you are using is essentially alpha or at best beta.
There is very little that new tech can do that old tech can't. The new stuff just does it more flashy. What is the most reliable and unproblematic part of the whole stack for me? PostgreSQL. Not some Node.js or npm (sorry, obsoleted, yarn now) or Angular (sorry, obsoleted, React now. Oh wait, obsoleted, Vue now).
There is a lot of marketing hype going on and much of the hype technologies isn't so much rocket science. "Big data" - that's just a lot of data combined with algorithms for which we finally have the storage and processing power. Nothing that would surprise a 1960s computer scientist. "Machine learning" - again we now have the power to do it and made some advances in how to build neural networks etc. but in the end there's not much there that's not 50 years old. "The Cloud" - a nifty hosting-on-demand system with containers, a mainframe operator would look at it and go "interesting approach".
Where I agree is that legacy systems are a major headache. But that is rarely a technology issue.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
80 percent of IT decision makers are incompetent. If the technology is holding you back and you are the decision maker you have no excuses. Step up to the executive team and state your business case or stop stealing air.
You can replace my legacy mission critical servers when you pry them from my cold dead robotic hands covered with synthetic flesh.
We use LINUX. It's not "obsolete", all we do is crunch massive DNA sequences. We don't "need" graphics to do that.
The graphics are something we do on another machine.
Now, authorize those 4000 TB drives we need and stop whining.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-...
Greed is the root of all evil.
How can IT decsion makers claim that outdated tech is holding them back when all they have to do is decide to replace old hard- and software?
The environemnt I work in is still using LDAP along side AD, and with that, they are using ldap as a god damn database of personal information. Need someone in an AD security group? refer to LDAP and make an entitlement. It's a god damn nightmare.
If its holding them back, why don't they open their wallets and fix the problem.
Sure, 25 years ago Exabyte was a popular brand name and terabyte-sized RAID arrays were high-end. Today, a TB thumb drive is what managers carelessly stick into their pockets and complain when it malfunctions.
Today an Exabyte (million terabytes) are common and handling zettabytes (1000 EB) is Big Data.
Gut-Based Decisions
Nope, entirely empirically derived. Their javascript computer vision based AI app runs way too slow. Hardware is totally lagging behind software and holding things back.
When asked in a survey what/where the problem with an organization being held back, the person is far more likely to point to technology as opposed to their own skill or lack thereof.
Perhaps these so-called IT decision makers need to make a decision to spend money updating their technology.
I say "GOOD!"
* as in "...you're not the customer; you're the product being sold"
Good, because your ignorance is shining brightly.
Tech costs money. Companies don't have enough money, unless they're very successful. Very successful companies have money because they don't spend it all on tech.
I think it's IT decision makers holding shit back because they are as dumb as a bag of rocks.
82.327% of CEO's report inability to mature business process due to constantly changing IT infrastructure and services.
Poor leadership is what holds companies back. Spending billions on the hot new shit that they don't understand and isn't appropriate for them holds companies back. Distracting employees with demands for immediate responses via email and IM is holding companies back.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
With Fedex, their software and website is so dated and out of wack that it is almost becoming impossible for anyone to actually ship anything anymore. Everyone will eventually jump ship if they don't do something, how can this company not be investing in the future at this point in the game, it's mind boggling. Especially with all these new upstart shipping efforts out there popping up daily. We keep a windows 8 machine in house and running (barely) just to do shipping quotes on because I still haven't been able to get their horribly written software to run on any new computers as of yet. What a waste of my time. I really feel for the decision makers at FedEx who's hands are OBVIOUSLY tied behind their backs by their management. They look like amateurs at this point, it's embarrassing for whoever works in their IT department I'm sure. I wouldn't admit that I worked their if I was in IT. Honestly nothing new that works has come out of FedEx since 2012.
The other 20% are saying that outdated IT decision makers are holding us back.