Source: Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under. | The Register | Mark Pesce, October 2015
“Consider: nearly every organisation of any scale has legacy (but functioning) systems so old they can no longer be upgraded or even maintained properly. Uptime has become a god, and capacity has been sacrificed on its altar.”
“Another view is that the industry that creates disruption is ironically terrified to disrupt itself. The biggest vendors cleverly act more as psychiatrists than problem-solvers, soothing fears, reassuring IT managers with gentle whispers of ‘Everything will be alright,’ as both walk a garden path into irrelevance.”
Abandon your false sense of stability
“Embracing change means abandoning the false sense of stability IT has offered management as part of its bargain to increase productivity. Productivity is not a function of stability. It’s about the wholesale revision of business processes to meet or generate market needs. Productivity demands that we junk everything comfortable, everything safe, everything stable, set our faces to the wind, and explore the unknown.”
Staying the same has an increasing irrelavency cost
“A recent quip from Saul Kaplan puts it best: ‘Marginal cost of staying the same is rising. Think of it as inflation eating away at your relevancy rather than capital.’ “
IT needs to move beyond infrastructure to become a strategic asset
“IT has become infrastructure where it should always be a strategic asset, wielded like a blade, cutting a swath through markets and competitors. How many IT departments can say they are the most important element of the business?”