80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)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 From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.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And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back.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.

Re:And the other way around

[Bigbutt]

This is pretty much it. In an organization with 1,200 Unix or Unix peripherals, at my last check 91% of the gear is End of Life in one manner or another (OS and/or Hardware). The business won't prioritize replacements due to spending the time to work on testing new gear vs spending time creating new software. Information security won't step in and require patching for vulnerabilities or upgrading in general and their gear is just as outdated. They have no idea what's in the environment so have no idea if servers are compliant or not. About the only time we can address technical debt is when a product is retired. Even product patches address the patch and not upgrading the environment as that's not prioritized.

[John]

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 So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data".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

[Archangel Michael]

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.

Re:Gut-Based Decisions?

[Cajun Hell]

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"?

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.

Not *outdated tech*

[ilsaloving]

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.

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.