Your New Year’s resolutions could hurt your IT strategy

It seems that everyone has a take on New Year’s resolutions at this time of year. You may have a New Year IT strategy yourself.

You can bet that IT vendors and bloggers will be talking about the latest innovations that you should be investing in. Some of our favourites are listed at the bottom of this article. While many of them are very inspiring and talk of grand futures featuring AI, Cloud technologies, and strategic visionaries leading the way, very few admit the realities of the world.

Reality: Innovation is expensive

Gartner has predicted that IT budgets will only rise 3.2% on average in 2019. This leaves a big gap between IT leaders’ aspirations and the reality of their budgets. So what do you do? Many organisations talk about using minimal deployment teams to test the latest technologies. They then build business cases based on these to gain the necessary investment.

But we’ve got another option for you that’s easier, simpler, and much more effective.

Switching to third-party support will quickly reduce your vendor support costs by at least 50%. For many organisations, this is one of the largest line items in their budgets. Third-party support provides superior quality support. But it also frees up much-needed budget so you can invest in your future (and perhaps your New Year’s resolutions).

You can use our free savings calculator tool to see how much you can save.

Reality: Your current systems probably work quite well

Everyone talks about innovations and new technology at this time of year, but nobody talks about how stable and effective your current systems are!

The world is on a never-ending sales cycle, continually pushing new upgrades and technologies. But there is a reason you invested so much in your current technology setup, and there is a reason why your organisation is currently running smoothly (unless it isn’t, in which case, ignore this point). Many organisations are quite happy with their setups but are feeling pressured to invest in technologies like the Cloud. This kind of investment could potentially disrupt their entire business to fast-track onto something that may not be ready for their use-cases yet. This is something we’ve seen with Oracle’s own painful six years and counting transition to the Cloud.

Have you managed to get everything you can out of your current systems? We believe many organisations can achieve real competitive advantage by sweating their existing assets and improving the performance of their current systems. Ignore the sales teams of Oracle, SAP, and every other big vendor that is trying to force you to invest in its latest products by cutting support for its “legacy” systems.

Work with a third-party support provider like Support Revolution, that can support your legacy systems for the long term.

Reality: Many new technologies are untested or not suitable yet

We’ve mentioned it before, but Oracle is still working on transitioning its own business to the Cloud. It has taken them six years so far and a lot of pain. And this isn’t an isolated case. Many of the vendor’s latest technologies are works in progress, and Oracle isn’t averse to using its first customers as guinea pigs to test functionality and performance.

Being an early adopter can be a fantastic way to get a competitive advantage, but you still need to judge risk and reward correctly. We see many organisations making huge and unnecessary investments in technologies that don’t add anything to their current setups, but they feel compelled to use them because “it’s the latest thing.”

We think organisations can find just as much benefit by sweating their current tech assets and using third-party support to reduce their costs. This can set you up to take advantage of technologies like Cloud once they are fit for your specific purposes.

Is your New Year IT strategy helping or hurting?

Before making your next big innovation leap this year, we recommend reviewing your current tech portfolio. What is and isn’t working? What can you leverage further before scrapping? If you are going to make that big leap to Cloud, what does the transition plan look like? Too many organisations (and experienced IT leaders) underestimate the complexity and longevity of big IT projects. They end up relying on the “legacy” systems they are trying to replace.

We can help you leverage those legacy systems for longer, or save you money on those legacy systems while you transition to other technologies. 

Some of our favourite New Year IT strategy posts for IT leaders

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