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Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com) 143

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from maximizing value. From a report: Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities. Also that trust and quality issues slow progress, with only 29 percent of respondents having complete trust in the quality of their organization's data. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) say they face unprecedented volumes of data but struggle to generate useful insights from it, estimating that they use only about half (51 percent) of the data they collect or generate. What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.
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80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back More

80 Percent of IT Decision Makers Say Outdated Tech is Holding Them Back

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  • Gut-Based Decisions? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.

    So what you are saying, is that over half of all business decisions are based on "gut feelings"?

    • Re:Gut-Based Decisions? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:27AM (#56929654) Homepage Journal

      What's more, respondents estimate that less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data.

      So what you are saying, is that over half of all business decisions are based on "gut feelings"?

      It's only estimated to be about half, based on their gut feelings. The data tells a different story about how much the data is getting used. I'm trying to make sense of the data but the math is actually kind of hard. But my gut tells me that this data tells me it's about half the decisions.

      I'll revise my estimate as more guts come in.

    • Gut-Based Decisions

      Nope, entirely empirically derived. Their javascript computer vision based AI app runs way too slow. Hardware is totally lagging behind software and holding things back.

  • A lot of outdated tech sits inside I.T. storage closets to gather dust. Most companies don't have a plan to recycle outdated tech.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • A lot of outdated tech sits inside I.T. storage closets to gather dust. Most companies don't have a plan to recycle outdated tech.

      And how exactly is outdated tech sitting powered off in a storage closet degrading current business and decision making?

      If the answer here was as simple as "recycle", we wouldn't be having this discussion. You're sure as hell not going to fund a proper hardware refresh by recycling old crap for pennies.

      • And how exactly is outdated tech sitting powered off in a storage closet degrading current business and decision making?

        When I did a PC refresh at a local hospital, I cleaned out an I.T. closet in between tickets for six weeks. I reclaimed 600 square feet of usable space, found the floor that no one had seen in eight years, found a $10K plasma TV that was "lost" for seven years, and made the FTE techs look bad because a contractor cleaned up their mess in between tickets.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by malkavian ( 9512 )

          A truly awesome tech would have grabbed a few FTE techs to lend a hand, passed the glory to them (with an aside to themselves as an also ran).
          That would've got you great karma with the FTEs, a knowing nod from management, and a great chance to network.

          • Not at that hospital. Everyone hated the IT staff. I've never worked in such a hostile IT environment. I had to tell the nurses that I was a contractor to avoid the abuses that the FTE techs got on a regular basis.

  • 80 percent of IT Decision Implementers... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    On the other hand, a similar percentage of IT Decision Implementers recognize the "new data-driven opportunities" as being buzzword cow-pies that entice the MBAs with no technical skills.

  • And the other way around (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:29AM (#56929202) Journal
    And 90% of IT Techs Say that Outdated Decision Makers are Holding Them Back. Coincidentally, if you solve that problem the organization gets agile enough to keep up with current standards.

    • So much this, they WANT the data. But don't want to spend the money on ensuring proper processes for capturing said data.

      But the data isn't any good! Duh, GIGO still rules.

    • Re:And the other way around (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bigbutt ( 65939 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:40AM (#56929328) Homepage Journal

      This is pretty much it. In an organization with 1,200 Unix or Unix peripherals, at my last check 91% of the gear is End of Life in one manner or another (OS and/or Hardware). The business won't prioritize replacements due to spending the time to work on testing new gear vs spending time creating new software. Information security won't step in and require patching for vulnerabilities or upgrading in general and their gear is just as outdated. They have no idea what's in the environment so have no idea if servers are compliant or not. About the only time we can address technical debt is when a product is retired. Even product patches address the patch and not upgrading the environment as that's not prioritized.

      [John]

    • Agile enough, IF you have a large enough I.T. staffing budget to cover the number of extra team members needed to manage so many different things changing in such a short time frame.

      It takes time to learn, such as getting certified, on new products and services. While somebody is studying or getting certified on the latest addition to the tech, and supporting the users calling into the call center with learning how to operate the new thingamabob, somebody else has to fill that tech's shoes and support wh
  • That get totally sold on the Cloud, instead of getting a decent infrastructure in place. I've worked at a few places with horrid CRM / Salesforce integration because they'll buy the software and then implement it with cheap coders from India / the Philippines. At the current company I'm at, we had a much better implementation of HPNA and now because of "cost savings" and other factors, like probably some executive being treated to a strip club, we are switching to NCM, which has a Java based front end, lo

  • Someone Else's Fault (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jaime2 ( 824950 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:37AM (#56929294)

    80 percent of IT decision makers say they're ineffective because of someone else's choice, not theirs.

    We had the technology to handle terabyte size databases twenty years ago. Data warehouses aren't new. Columnstores and NoSQL don't make data analysis any easier. So, I don't see "outdated tech" being a very good excuse for stupidity like "less than half (48 percent) of all business decisions are based on data". This looks like nothing other than a cheap ad for the company mentioned in the article.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Yea what it usually, really, boils down to is cost. I worked for a company (large consumer product company) that had been doing this type of stuff for decades. But they spent massive amounts on money on the required hardware, software, and most importantly analysts and developers who could turn all that data into something useful. And it worked, spectacularly. They could track sales of their products at the store level in near-real time and adjust stocking, marketing, plano's, etc on the fly. It's a big pa

  • I see the opposite problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by imidan ( 559239 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:40AM (#56929324)

    In my previous job, we had no problem with outdated technology holding us back. In fact, we leased server hardware and had it replaced at the recommended interval, we had a petabyte disk array, virtualization, and even a mobile telepresence device (not heavily used). We had plenty of tech. What the bosses wouldn't do is hire more people. They were convinced that the solution to any problem was throwing more gigahertz and terabytes at it. But the hard problems we needed to address weren't technological in nature, they were human problems. Last I heard, the department was crumbling and their software solution retired in shambles. But people are expensive, and you have to keep paying them to keep them.

    In the place I work now, they've been collecting client usage data for 10 years, but they've never organized or analyzed it. That's what I'm doing there, but again, the barrier to this wasn't technological in nature, it was just that it was never anyone's job to do it.

  • Sounds like an advert (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theshowmecanuck ( 703852 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @10:41AM (#56929334) Journal
    This looks like an advertisement masquerading as "news".

    • Yep, the study was paid for by Snaplogic who conveniently sells solutions to this problem. I've not dealt with Snaplogic at all so I can't really weigh an opinion; but I usually assume that the bigger the marketing department the bigger pile of shit they're compensating for. Good products sell themselves; just ask Linus.

      It's also been my experience that if your quick to jump into the "new shiny" stuff then that same new shiny stuff from last year is now "outdated". There's value is slowly adapting new techn

  • I agree. If my organization had access to AI deep learning systems we would be much farther ahead.
  • Most of the time, the problem is there is no budget set aside for the new tech. Or for the staff training to use new tech. Or to spend on a vendor/partner/consultant to help determine what new tech to use. So isn't that the real issue? If you had the money, you would solve the problem.

    • no budget is called poor planning or poor management unless your company is going broke.

    • I think the emphasis is as much on not being able to *find* a vendor/partner/consultant to provide good advice and *consultation* on what technology they should be using. We had an expensive, highly regarded consultant update our systems to accommodate two offices which needed simultaneous read-write access to ~3TB of data with change rates of about 2GB/hour, with a 100Mb site-to-site VPN with 10ms latency.

      His initial solution was to use FreeNAS and rsync to achieve this, but ended up "needing" to use WInd

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They're the decision makers (Score:4, Informative)

    by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:02AM (#56929478)
    If the decision makers are feeling that way, they should make the decision to replace the outdated tech.

  • Is the new tech any better? (Score:3)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:03AM (#56929488)
    I'm not sure I agree that sticking with working systems and a known set of shortcomings is necessarily worse than trying to implement newer systems that don't have any measurable quality advantage and introduce a unknown set of shortcomings that you get to find out the hard way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      You're absolutely right, but I think you can get at some of the root causes here being IT vendors abandoning products before their useful life has ended as a means of ginning up new sales, new support contracts and new licensing, inevitably for higher prices and less value. The churn wheel seems to turn faster than ever.

      And then you have vendors like VMware who have in some ways exhausted the market for their primary product. Nearly everyone who can remotely justify virtualization (which right now is down

  • Local maximums = global minimums (Score:3)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:08AM (#56929522)

    A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from maximizing value.

    Maximizing IT value or maximizing company value? Those are not necessarily the same thing. Just because you invest heavily in IT does not necessarily mean that those investments will equate to an improvement on the bottom line of the company. It might but it's not a given. There is an old maxim that local maximums often make for global minimums. Having the most efficient IT in the world doesn't matter if the rest of the company operations suffer as a result.

    We have to remember that IT is a cost. It is a (very important) tool. It is a means to an end and not an end itself. You invest in IT when it will permit the company to be more profitable. If the cost of upgrading the IT to maximum efficiency exceeds the profits enabled by that upgrade then you don't do it unless there is a strategic imperative forcing you to. And to be fair it's not always clear what the impact of an IT upgrade will be. I've seen them be hugely beneficial but I've also seen them bankrupt companies and of course lots of cases of it having little to no change.

    If you want to upgrade the IT in a company the challenge is to make a case for how it will provide an ROI which is ultimately what most business owners actually care about.

  • Companies are risk averse. That can be a good thing, but taken to extreme it holds them back. There are lots of little startups out there with innovative solutions to real problems. I am building a new kind of data management system and finding early adopters feels like trying to find life on Mars. Everyone wants someone else to take all the risks. They want someone else to test it; to give feedback on features; to devote resources to make the product better. Yet these same companies complain that the only

  • The real problem is poor planning (Score:3)

    by fish_in_the_c ( 577259 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:28AM (#56929660)

    So you have outdated 'tech/software' 'holding you back'?

    Can you show me the plan you made when you installed said tech and software for it's maintenance / convalescence? Including expected budget for upgrades and replacements in a reasonable and timely fashion?
      Did you ensure you would be able to migrate all important data from that proprietary vendor format to whatever the new best thing would be to avoid vendor lock in?
    Do you have everything sufficiently documented so that someone else can take over when your expert retires? Did you spend the money and time to do these things right?

    NO? That sounds like a MANAGEMENT problem. Would you have done that with little planning with any other kind of company resource? Company vehicles? Buildings? .... hmm... no?

  • If Only! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If only there were a way for "IT decision makers" to somehow change this situation!

    So sad, that dated IT technology is holding them back. You know, perhaps some kind of decision could be made, by, I dunno, some sort of IT management type.

    Yes, I know that there is a bit more to it than just an aspiration for better technology. Budgets, upper management, I know the whole drill. It's still a bit too rich for me, that IT decision makers are decrying what is, in effect, a failure to decide or act to change th

  • Not *outdated tech* (Score:5, Informative)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:44AM (#56929762)

    Blah blah blah old tech bad blah blah blah new tech good blah blah blah. Oh look, a company that sells a SAAS service says that old tech is bad and new tech is good!

    This is such a pathetic self-serving refrain and I am SO sick of hearing it.

    "Old" tech does *not* hold you back. Generally speaking, it never has, and it never will.

    What *will* hold you back? Poor management will hold you back. Badly implemented technology that leaves you with a big pile of technical debt will hold you back. Hiring people based on buzzword bingo will hold you back.

    I know companies who, for example, went all in on Hadoop because it was "new" and "cool" and "let you slice and dice massive amounts of data data with ease". (Their entire dataset was less than 1TB) Less than a year later, and the entire effort has been discarded because the effort required just to maintain the thing was overwhelming compared to the value they were actually getting out of it. They were able to accomplish what they wanted with much less effort using a single simple instance of SQL Server.

    The current culture of treating with disdain anything older than 6 months has to be one of the most profoundly idiotic notions to have ever come out of the computer industry. We have become fans of reinventing the wheel over and over, without so much as once thinking about whether there is even a benefit to the effort.

    It's one thing to introduce a new technology for realistic, practical reasons, such as you simply don't have the manpower to implement said thing with what you already have. But do NOT just spew junk self-serving surveys that blanket says "you gotta throw out what you got and get this new shiny" because that's a lie and you know it.

    • Just because the innovation timecycle is now measured in months doesn't necessarily mean that companies necessarily NEED to keep up with it.

      I can't think of a dumber idea operationally or economically than to switch to something new on a corporate scale simply because of the novelty.

    • The current culture of treating with disdain anything older than 6 months.... We have become fans of reinventing the wheel over and over, without so much as once thinking about whether there is even a benefit to the effort.

      But if I'm going to have to learn anything, I might as well learn something new. Besides, we learn from our mistakes so the new shiny won't have any of the old crud. Any if I'm one of the first on the bandwagon, it looks great for me -- look how smart I am! I can program in Z, which is guaranteed to be 23 time BETTER than C!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Some companies went so far as to roll their own Hadoop deployment on commodity hardware and storage

          We tried doing it from scratch as a learning exercise while building up expertise. Our conclusion?

          Don't.

  • It is really too bad (Score:3)

    by bravecanadian ( 638315 ) on Wednesday July 11, 2018 @11:55AM (#56929864)

    That the IT decision makers are generally:

    a) beancounters who create this technological debt out of ignorance and generally against the recommendations of their subject matter experts.

    or

    b) IT people who are knowledgeable enough to avoid this problem, but not powerful enough in the organization to follow through because of the beancounters above them.

  • A study by analysts Vanson Bourne for self service automation specialist SnapLogic looks at the data priorities and investment plans of IT decision makers, along with what's holding them back from giving money to SnapLogic.

    "Data driven" is a buzzword. It's synonymous with "not bullshit". People have been making "data driven" decisions forever.

    Among the findings are that 80 percent of those surveyed report that outdated technology holds their organization back from taking advantage of new data-driven opportunities.

    ie, buy SnapLogic. SHOCKING!

    Also that trust and quality issues slow progress, with only 29 percent of respondents having complete trust in the quality of their organization's data.

    Those 29% are idiots then. Complete trust? WTF are they smoking? But this is just a bullshit poll where some people picked a number 1-5.

    Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) say they face unprecedented volumes of data but struggle to generate useful insights from it,

    ie, the data-driven crazy is mostly bullshit.

    Woooo! We have a ton of data! ....now what fucking good is it?

    estimating that they use only about half (51 percent) of the data they collect or generate.

    That's... actually just fine. No real shocker that the people harvesting data errored on the side of being overzealo

  • More like winning Buzzword Bingo.

    Like putting everything "In The Cloud!"

    Why?

    Just because it was in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal?

  • Can I have some of whatever they are smoking?

    What is holding us back is hyped technology. Not reliable, proven-to-work "outdated" tech.

    I recently returned to some web development after many years of absence. Don't want to tell the whole story here, that's maybe for a longer article somewhere, but OMG is the whole environment splintered and incredibly fragile. Half the modules or libraries you need are not maintained any longer because the author has moved on to the newest hype. Almost everything is replaced

  • You can replace my legacy mission critical servers when you pry them from my cold dead robotic hands covered with synthetic flesh.

    We use LINUX. It's not "obsolete", all we do is crunch massive DNA sequences. We don't "need" graphics to do that.

    The graphics are something we do on another machine.

    Now, authorize those 4000 TB drives we need and stop whining.

  • The environemnt I work in is still using LDAP along side AD, and with that, they are using ldap as a god damn database of personal information. Need someone in an AD security group? refer to LDAP and make an entitlement. It's a god damn nightmare.
  • 82.327% of CEO's report inability to mature business process due to constantly changing IT infrastructure and services.
  • Poor leadership is what holds companies back. Spending billions on the hot new shit that they don't understand and isn't appropriate for them holds companies back. Distracting employees with demands for immediate responses via email and IM is holding companies back.
  • With Fedex, their software and website is so dated and out of wack that it is almost becoming impossible for anyone to actually ship anything anymore. Everyone will eventually jump ship if they don't do something, how can this company not be investing in the future at this point in the game, it's mind boggling. Especially with all these new upstart shipping efforts out there popping up daily. We keep a windows 8 machine in house and running (barely) just to do shipping quotes on because I still haven't bee
  • The other 20% are saying that outdated IT decision makers are holding us back.

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