Forgive us a few military analogies - they're actually sometimes quite helpful in shedding some light on business. In this case, they're touting the benefits of flexibility, which we feel is a hugely overlooked issue when considering IT investment.
Most systems installed for company use are done so for specific requirements - a product to support, or a regulatory report to publish. Indeed, in such cases its inflexibility (often expressed as "meeting requirements") is touted as one of its biggest benefits. Such is the suspicion of IT spending that anything proposed that cannot be tied directly to a specific outcome is laughed out of the CFO's office. However, much as those who bought an advanced inflexible air ticket in a self-congratulatory burst of frugality only to be burnt by the need to buy a wholly new ticket as travel plans change, so a rush to screw down a tech project to deliver only in one area becomes a false economy as priorities shift with new regulation and/or market evolution, necessitating wholesale change.
Of course, many will accuse me of wanting an IT free for all, giving the techies carte blanche to do what they like: nothing could be further from the truth. There are a few simple things that "normal" (i.e. non-techies) people can do to build flexibility into their information systems and not break the bank - indeed, actually save money relative to the old fashioned project approach. First, when considering a business challenge that requires technology, play the "type of" game: when considering the challenge to be met (and, interestingly, many do not in much depth), consider what it a "type of". So, a project to deliver a report on GDPR is often just a type of customer data request; a project to automate the production of marketing powerpoints with some KPI information is a type of business data request, a desire to see employee holiday allowance a type of HR data request, and so on. In all cases it ought to be the management's priority to ask for plans for the latter, even if the closest crocodile to the canoe is the former.
The pain in the short term in combining the long term vision in project planning is a huge gain in the medium to long term, as programmes to address each request group make the next short term emergency less of one. Not only will the company's ability to position itself for an ever-changing environment be transformed, its employees will suffer from less disruption from endless switchback "upgrades" where vendor systems are parachuted in at short notice to try to address an issue. Sounds expensive? Actually, no, the opposite. Playing the "type of" game reveals that most business processes are common across the piece, and are well catered for by cheap, rental cloud software rather than the specific industry vertical a vendor will try to lock you into.