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80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)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 From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.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.
And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back.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.
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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 So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data".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In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back.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.
This looks like an advertisement masquerading as "news".
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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.
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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.
And how exactly is outdated tech sitting powered off in a storage closet degrading current business and decision making?
When I did a PC refresh at a local hospital, I cleaned out an I.T. closet in between tickets for six weeks. I reclaimed 600 square feet of usable space, found the floor that no one had seen in eight years, found a $10K plasma TV that was "lost" for seven years, and made the FTE techs look bad because a contractor cleaned up their mess in between tickets.
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If the decision makers are feeling that way, they should make the decision to replace the outdated tech.
Only in the U.S.A. ...
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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.
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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.
It's only estimated to be about half, based on their gut feelings. The data tells a different story about how much the data is getting used. I'm trying to make sense of the data but the math is actually kind of hard. But my gut tells me that this data tells me it's about half the decisions.
I'll revise my estimate as more guts come in.
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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?
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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.
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.
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"...