80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)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 From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.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And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back.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 So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data".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In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back.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.