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80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)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 From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.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A lot of outdated tech sits inside I.T. storage closets to gather dust. Most companies don't have a plan to recycle outdated tech.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.
And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back.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!
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.
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.
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"...
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I've been in IT for 40 years, and yes, you're right. Its always been this way, it always will be. But there is a business decision reasoning for a lot of it. Let me break it down for you into three basic categories.
1) Bleeding edge. Hopping on every new tech that rolls around hoping to catch the top of the first wave. Most of which will die and go away and barely be remembered. The business case for this is agility. The down side is very rarely works out as intended or even tangentially. (Think BlockChain)
2) Mainstream. Slightly behind Bleeding edge by a couple years. Most of the rough edges have been worn off, and there is enough data to show the tech is actually useful. The business case for this approach is waiting for others to show it will pan out decreases risk. The downside is you might be behind competitors who are in Group 1. (Think: Cloud)
3) Trailing Edge. Finally on the bandwagon, long after it is established. The business case for this is long term stability and minimal risk. The downside is obvious as competitors have long since adopted tech and has made effective use of it, and the risk of obsolescence as you adopt tech. (Wireless G)
Unless you're in Group 1, everything you look at will seem like "outdated tech" to some degree.
Current tech is only related to tech from 20-30 years ago if you view tech as waves of use. If you don't understand what you're looking at, its because you're focusing on what the tech is doing, not its life-cycle. Not saying that is bad, it is just a different perspective (which may work fine). The point being, if you're in the industry long enough, you see technological life-cycles everywhere.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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.
I can understand Win10 bullshit and disagree with Apples move to portless designs, but how exactly is a portless Mac preventing you from adopting it? You've justified spending $3K+ on Apple hardware and OSX, but you can't justify another $200 for any I/O adapters that may be needed?
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.
wow 48% huh? I never would have thought it was that high.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Ancient:
1. Item is suffering from incompatibilities, and Google search results are either no longer applicable or have disappeared entirely.
2. Item is more than 1 year old, and isn't trendy.
3. Item costs more to operate than to replace and retrain staff. So somewhere between 4 years old, and 15 years old.
Right there with you. Microsoft has gotten a lot of bad rep for being in category 3, when so many other vendors (Google, Apple, ???) are in Categories 1 & 2. It is sad to see they are caving to pressure and a desire for popularity that they are shifting to category 1.
Is category 1 really necessary for a compelling business model? Is Google Android having the education market and Apple having the iPod/iPad/iPhone market really that big a threat to Microsoft's profitability as a Category 3 service provider? I guess the insane profits that Apple generates as a category 1/2 with the iPhone is too tempting to pass up.
Microsoft does have Enterprise LTSB releases of Windows 10 for Category 3 support, so they do acknowledge a need for that level of stability in business.
Someone whose specialty is killing jobs.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Its not really that expensive. Its just complex. Cloudera Hadoop is free for download. The support is what costs money. If you wanted, you could hire a bunch of green employees straight out of college with CIS degrees and pay the $1500 each to get them all certified with Cloudera. Then just buy two racks worth of commodity servers or buy virtualized space in a cloud environment. All in, you are looking at under a Million Dollars to get an enterprise class big data platform that can store more than a Petabyte of data. The tricky part is the months or years required to start streaming or scooping all the data into the data lake.
I've worked with (and specialized in) "ancient shit", and it's almost invariably just an extreme form of Michael's third case. What was once just a reliable piece of equipment has been part of the enterprise for so long that management has forgotten what it actually does.
To use your example, it's not just a plotter they see. It's the magical portal that turns designs into tangible drawings. Sure, it could be replaced by a new piece of equipment, but that's a big scary unknown. They'd have to replace the drivers, maybe the print server, certainly some cables... and that's just on the "input" side of the device. Then there's the slightly-different paper weight, ink, line width, gloss, and all the other trivial differences on the "output" side.
To a system engineer or sysadmin, those differences are minor, and simply open the door to further improvements. To a manager, they're all risks that can't be guaranteed to not disrupt operations. Their business case to keep the old device is that the risks are known, and have long since been mitigated with some well-established workaround procedures.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
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"...
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.
Talking about physical technology is a red herring in my opinion. From an IT perspective incompatibility is really a minor issue and while you may need to make the case that new hardware needs to be purchased, it's something that can eventually be done or the company decided they just don't need it. The larger issue is the lack of data literacy with regard to what data is collected, why it is collected, and what segments of that data show. The former is a creeping problem typically with data being collected because of an error in the past and the collection is an attempt to avoid the error repeating. Over time the reasoning for it is forgotten and the data isn't collected as reliably. The second is a problem where people don't see a piece of data as relevant to their processes and don't collect it causing issues for other people. The third is a problem with a larger concern because if you're delivering a segment of your data to a customer, you need to understand why the customer wants that data. If you don't understand that then you may not realize that there are certain constraints that end up put in place in the data you collect, or even your business processes unless you want to risk upsetting and losing the customer.
At the end of the day you're talking about a business communication issue in many cases. A manager doesn't adequately train his employees on the data being collected or even enforce the collection of it. A department head may get indignant and defensive when another department head complains to him about how the lack of data collection causes his people to have to do more work. It's ugly and protectionism over their various fiefdoms.
It's really a shame because the larger the company the larger their data set and when you have a larger data set it becomes possible to leverage that data to identify inefficiencies that can be improved as a cost savings measure. But alas, GIGO rules the day.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
Hey...an "engineer" answers the phone/email. What more do you expect? They know you can't back out of the multi-million dollar fiasco now.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
This actually happened in manufacturing during the 80's since we were getting our asses handed to us by the Japanese. The Japanese learned that you have to get constant feedback from engineers on the ground and so this philosophy spread to American companies for a while (until they started getting torn apart and sent over seas). Not sure what the buzz-lingo-word for it was.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock