Move to the cloud they said, it’ll revolutionise everything, give you infinite opportunity to enable your business and above all it’ll save you loads of money.
All of this is true (in time, with work), giving your business the flexibility of scaling IT infrastructure and services up/down at a moments notice, right-size servers or services, accessing ready-made services to enhance your product or re-visualised your data or even rearchitecting them to use micro-services that cost a fraction of having an entire server dedicated to a task.
All well and good but how do you know you’ve saved money, do you know how much IT is costing you now? And how much does it matter…
- You know your staffing costs.
- You know your external support costs.
- You know your software licensing costs.
- Do you know your infrastructure costs?
Recently I had the experience to be a fly on the wall, witnessing a small team of people try and work out how much on-premises IT infrastructure was costing a business; I stood by and observed
- Floor space
- Power
- Cooling
- Maintenance (internal and external contract cost)
- Spares
- New equipment costs for growth
It was painful. Really painful.
- People with differing priorities in the business, too busy to get real data to drive the calculations
- A lack of understanding of a broader picture as to all the components that need to be factored in calculating a cost in the first place
- SME’s with not enough experience to take an educated estimate on unknowns or what those unknowns may be
- Not to mention getting bogged down in superficial detail trying to compare like for like on-premises configurations with cloud solutions
- And then there was the double-counting!
Painful.
The reality is this, regardless of what your current solution is setting you back financially it’s the inflexibility and lack of innovation that is hindering your business from benefitting from its technology investment.
Something I would happily segway into is the impact on team morale when IT systems just don’t work or are too cumbersome in daily use…something for another article.
Engaging a Technical Business Analyst to uncover the pain points in how technology is (or isn’t used) will surface not so hard metrics that have the greatest impact on the performance of the team and the business. These things can be measured if needed – through feedback loops or productivity scores which (if you’re that way inclined) can be seen on balance sheets. Of course, this all helps with decision making and prioritisation but shouldn’t be the only thing being considered.
Sure, the finance analysts will dig into the pounds and pence and the technical engineer will uncover every feature that isn’t being used to its fullest (regardless if it actually has real merit). It’s only when you take a broader approach, step back and appreciate the bigger picture, that you will see that what you are doing today, whilst it worked at a time, should evolve much like the rest of your business does; giving the best possible product/service/outcome to your customer.
So, how much is your IT costing you? Go ask the person using it…and don’t ask for an answer in a currency!
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