Making corporate IT decisions is getting easier!
Originally published August 2020
The IT Industry is used to businesses coming to a crossroads in their strategy and having to make choices.
ICL or IBM mainframes — George 3 or MVS? Apple or IBM PC? Ethernet or Token ring? Open systems or proprietary? And more recently on-premise vs managed service. CTOs have long had the challenge of balancing being an advocate of implementing the latest technology versus pioneering and having to circle the wagons afterwards.
However, the decisions being made by the CTO today are far more business critical than ever before. Getting it wrong can mean the business literally stops tomorrow.
In a discussion with a partner last week, a financial service client’s strategy came up. They had recognised the serious threat to the business from cyber-attacks. They had a few people with security knowledge in their IT team, but their time was occupied dealing with day-to-day issues. They needed to stay current with the technology and associated threats. They needed to be on hand 24x7, they needed a response plan that was being continually updated and they needed continuity and consistency in the team going forward.
These present a real challenge even for those whose key skills are in technology. They are a far greater challenge if the core skills in the business are not focused on technology, but instead focused on a vertical market such as Financial Services (or manufacturing, retail, life sciences).
It is not just in security but in other areas such as mobile, IoT, Artificial Intelligence and business continuity where non-technology businesses are struggling to keep up with both the opportunities offered by innovation and their associated threats. This in turn provides opportunity for others to disrupt traditional markets, using the enabling technologies to displace long term incumbents.
So how does a business stay safe, embrace new technologies, become a disrupter and not the disrupted?
It’s about embracing the same principles in the technology industry that are used every day in the other industries. No one retailer mines the ore, grows the crops, designs the clothes, manufactures the finished items, distributes, runs the mall… they build a trusted supply chain and use their experienced retail resources to manage it. Focussing on what they do best and outsourcing the rest to partners.
But there is a difference. A retailer or manufacturer will probably have more than one line of clothing or one assembly line. How many stock systems will it have? It may have a number of outlets or dealers, how many on-line, public facing transaction sites does it have? It may have many employees to share the load but probably only one HR and payroll system.
As we have seen through some high-profile cases recently, single points of failure still exist and typically duplication, as opposed to replication, in IT systems doesn’t happen. It’s expensive, requires resources and is difficult to explain. IT continues to be a cost centre not a profit centre.
Maybe we need a new term for the IT department in a business. Maybe it’s an ‘Opportunity Centre’. An opportunity to either get ahead of the competition and gain market share, whilst at the same time an opportunity to lose a business millions through mis-management, lack of focus and targeted cyber-attacks.
There is no silver bullet, no one size fits all solution to help the CTO here.
At a time when technology decisions are becoming even more difficult; cloud vs on-premise vs hybrid; virtual machines vs containers, Cobol vs python (really!); finding trusted partners to work with is really important. The benefit of being a global distributor is that at Tech Data we have relationships with the largest, furthest reaching, IT providers and also the smallest, most innovative start-ups.
The aim of our ecosystem programme has been to bring these different businesses within our partner network together. To provide opportunities for them to collaborate and build solutions that help the CTO with some of the answers to the tough questions.
We have been running a series of partner innovation showcases during the year. Our next one, focused on ‘Red Hat, SAP and Multi-Cloud Management’ is scheduled for September.
For partners who would like to find out more, perhaps present their solutions, or for CTOs, looking to see if there are ecosystem solutions that may help them, please contact the Tech Data team.
