Given that Supl is all about IT investment, it may seem a little odd to write a blog piece highlighting the risks. However, it's the elephant in the room for everyone I speak to. Indeed, such is the level of disenchantment with technology, it's a wonder anyone does it at all.
What's the beef? For a start, it always seems to cost more than advertised. Second, it never appears quite when it was promised to appear. Lastly, it never seems to deliver what is promised. Apart from that, everything's just tickety-boo.
How does it all end up this way? Ironically, the biggest culprits are those measures put in place to mitigate the risks. The consequences of all that is the main focus of the effort becomes the project, not the purpose. All that monitoring superstructure is a hugely expensive burden on any business, and one that they will stomach only rarely leading to tech development becoming a series of disruptive fits and starts, rather than steady, organic progress.
If steady, organic progress sounds like a pipedream, then read on.
Organic is the key word. Too often IT is something external, something that gets done to the company. On my travels I am frequently struck by how little confidence otherwise immensely capable business people have in their ability to manage their own technology. This leads to painful outsourcing arrangements where two mutually incompatible languages (IT: tech, business: their business) crash into each other with the only common phraseology being that of the project: deadlines, costs etc. Then along comes the cloud....
The cloud represents, above all else, a governance revolution. Good cloud services have solved all the pointy-headed IT issues (server load, update patching, networking) and offer up a series of buttons to allow those who know what they want to configure the service to suit them. And who would know what suits them? Them. So it's actually better, and it's certainly far better value, shorn as you would be of expensive external resources and project teams. So why don't people do it?
Partly it's a fear that they'll get things wrong. In the project world, that's money down the drain and egg on face. With the cloud, there's the undo button and another go, maybe during the free trail of the service. Partly it's also advice from their existing IT partners, who are anything but impartial on this one.
Looking at this the other way around, actually the riskiest form of IT investment is the traditional sort. It almost always fails to deliver, and the cost overruns adds the risk of a overstressed P&L to the operational risks already present that prompted the investment in the first place. The only thing stopping the organic approach is the risk of doing things differently. Given the car crash with familiar methods, surely this is a risk worth embracing.