80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)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 From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.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.

Comments

And the other way around

[Errol backfiring]

And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back.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.

Someone Else's Fault

[Jaime2]

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 So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data".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.

I see the opposite problem

[imidan]

In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back.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.

Sounds like an advert

[theshowmecanuck]

This looks like an advertisement masquerading as "news".

Re:The tech isn't the problem

[Moryath]

PEBKAC explains most of these "IT Decision Makers" though. Rarely, if ever, is the "decision maker" technologically literate.

I did some contract IT for a construction company once. They had FOUR different "VPN Solutions". Two hardware ones on differing routers, two software ones that they'd decided to kludge together from "free to home user" alternatives like Hamachi.

The initial thing they were bitching about was that Hamachi had dropped the "free" option down to 5 computers max and several employees got frozen out. They wanted it "fixed", didn't want to hear that commercial use totally violated the "free account" terms of service and that Hamachi wasn't likely to change it without them paying money, and had lost all the documentation for either of their hardware solutions.

The "server" running an old NT4 domain? Oh yeah. Ancient as hell, looking to die any day, but the CEO didn't want to buy anything new or pay anyone to migrate it because "I spent good money on that and it was just fine when I got it and it still works."

I wasn't the first person to wind up just doing the duct tape repairs and I probably won't be the last. When I left, I wasn't even told they were firing me for a month (in which time they brought in a guy who was "tech savvy" to a site manager position, then threw a bunch of IT work at him and he quit, then they hired a second guy and did the same but he stayed, I guess). Three of their employees emailed me a couple month later asking me to come in to fix things for them because (a) "new tech guy" was never in the office and (b) they'd never been told I didn't do contract work for the company any more. I just emailed them back, told them I didn't do contract IT for the company more and that all my documentation had been returned to the CEO, sorry.

This is basically the same way virtually every "small business" winds up running, though. The people who make the pocketbook decisions (a) are technologically illiterate, (b) think that everything now is "free" or "cheap and easy with no maintenance" thanks to marketing drones and FOSS evangelists who go way the fuck too far overpromising, and (c) don't want to hear the words "preventative maintenance" or even "maintenance", ever.

Re:The tech isn't the problem

[Moryath]

The biggest thing was that NONE of their infrastructure was documented when I came in. I would literally find out that something existed if and only if someone reported a problem with it. I found out about the two hardware solutions from a user's laptop when they answered the question of which VPN application they were using was responded to with "this Hamachi thing, I forgot the passwords for the other two and the guy who set them up left."

Both of the "routers" for the building were in the ceiling. I wasn't allowed to pop my head up above the tiles to work out more than I could find out about them by going into their web control panels. Unfortunately whoever set THOSE up had actually been diligent and changed the factory default passwords...

The CEO didn't want to spend the money and get billed the hours it would have taken for me to factory-reset things, set them back up properly and document it all so that whoever came next would have the documents on how things were done. His attitude over and over was "just fix what needs fixing, I don't care as long as they can work."

From what you're describing it sounds like there are good reasons for your VPN overlaps, such as transitioning out a legacy / discontinued system. The issue I was describing was what you get when you've got the standard issue small business though:

- kludges deployed on the cheap and/or downright "free by violating license terms" by less than scrupulous people

- completely undocumented setups that haven't been maintained at all and got hooked into each other, sometimes even not by the IT person (there was a "wireless network" in one half of the building that was literally running off of a USB antenna from one user's desktop. I found out about it when they went on vacation and someone complained that "the wireless is down" because they'd shut off their desktop before leaving).

- Stuff that had been set up by the CEO's "oh but he's a really tech savvy kid, he could probably teach you a few things" nephew. I met the kid once. Nice enough but no, he wasn't "tech savvy" - he was the sort of dope who would plug in an off the shelf wireless AP and leave the SSID and password on factory default, then tell his uncle it was working perfectly. And don't you DARE try to tell the CEO his precious nephew hadn't set something up correctly or securely...

Oh and just to add insult to injury: their password scheme was nonsensical. The CEO insisted that everyone's password be their two initials, a dash, and then the company name. So that he "could check into any account if he needed to." He also had a bad habit of firing people without warning and not-on-good-terms, while not remembering to let his IT person know when someone was fired and to disable their account. Little good though that would probably do since everyone instantly understood the password "system"...