You notice that your home computer is struggling to open up the applications you use on a regular basis. This is mildly annoying and it is with disbelief that you realise you bought this PC three years ago. Now three years is an epoch in PC terms. Of course you have kept up with the major technological advancements but haven’t really paid a great deal of attention to the detail as you weren’t in the market for a new computer. But now you can’t believe how much a few hundred pounds will buy you. When you bought your current PC a laptop was out of the question but now you can pick a decent one for half what you paid for your desktop. So it is with great excitement that you start to explore what you could buy as a replacement.
The whole process is great fun and eventually you settle on the best product offer for you knowing full well that it will be superseded by a higher spec device before you have had time to get it out of the box and switch it on.
Take this scenario into the business world and the decision to upgrade your IT infrastructure becomes far more complex. Here you are not replacing one computer but a whole network. Proprietary software has to be migrated seamlessly onto whatever new operating platform you choose. And a change in operating software may have major ramifications on this proprietary software. Your IT department has planned and costed the exercise. It’s going to take months and it’s obvious that the project costs do not cover the inevitable disruption to ‘business as usual’ throughout the duration of the project. As if this wasn’t enough the supplier of your accounting package, that has been customised by them to meet your specific needs, is refusing to support any further adaptive engineering – they want you to migrate to one of their standard packages. This would be a huge undertaking so the decision is to stick with what you have and put off the inevitable for another day. This might seem to be the least risky option but in a highly competitive marketplace is might actually be corporate suicide.
If you look at institutions like the London Stock Exchange it’s obvious that operating with aging technology is a very risky strategy. New players like Chi-X and Turquoise have emerged as players in the share trading arena since the LSE lost its trading monopoly last year. These ‘young upstarts’ have been able to build their IT infrastructure with state of the art technology without having to consider any existing investment in legacy equipment. Whether they can justifiable accuse the LSE of having an outmoded infrastructure that is no longer capable of handling high trading volumes remains to be seen. But on the face of it they have a very compelling argument. A few more ‘software glitches’ like the one experienced on Monday 8th September and traders may well vote with their feet.
Is it possible to truly future proof a business? The answer is as complex as the problem; there has to be strategic decisions around owning or leasing infrastructure and keeping all business processes in-house or having the courage to outsource non-core elements to specialists. In the end it comes down to managing relationships and isn’t that what successful businesses are built upon – not IT infrastructure?
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