Another brief digression.
There are many reasons to invest in technology.
You want to be able to grow your business, that’s stipulated. So there are technologies out there that can help actively, directly improve your revenue, productivity, and profitability.
You also want to be able to protect your investments (as I’ve noted in other posts here). Technology investments can help you sleep better at night, knowing that your information is safe, and your business can go in in the face of disaster.
But technology spending always gets a bad rap. IT has always been a cost. Everybody sees IT as a money pit.
Well, I am not here to lie to you – IT is a cost. But my whole point here is not to tell you something you already know – it is to help you understand that spending on technology is a good idea – it is truly an investment.
Again, it is a matter of perception. Let me give you a simple example of a highly publicized bit of a brouhaha from recent history. A little something we call “Y2K”.
As you are all likely aware, Y2K refers to the inherent deficiency in many computer programs written in the mid-twentieth century. Two factors converged – programmers never thought their programs would remain useful as long as they did; and storage – memory and disk space – was expensive. So programmers used only two digits to depict years, just to save on space.
That was all hunky dory until it was noticed that, hey, when the year 2000 hits, the programs will think that it’s actually the year 1900. Hilarity would ensue.
Ok, actually, death, destruction, mayhem, and incorrect checking account balances would ensue. That’s what everyone thought. There was genuine concern that the technological infrastructure would fall apart.
You know what? Everyone was right. It could have been very, very ugly. Little things like the air traffic control system and the entire banking industry could have been affected.
Thus began a seriously massive effort to come up with ways to fix the problem, and execute on all the plans for remediation.
Well, as you all know, things did NOT break, planes did NOT fall out of the sky, January 1, 2000 was quite and peaceful, as these things go.
And what was the reaction of people outside the IT industry?
“Oh, those geeky IT guys made up all of that dire nonsense just to get us to spend a bunch of money on a non-issue! We’ve been had! See, the turn of the century came and went (well, actually, no, that was a year later) and there was no disaster!”
That was a frustrating experience, true. At the same time, that’s exactly how things are supposed to work. Obviously, nothing happened because of all that hard work and money spent to remediate the programs involved! And the result: smooth, invisible, stable, a non-event.
If you invest properly in your systems when they are working well, then your systems will continue to work well. They will be relentlessly reliable, and a solid member of your team – helping you grow your business.
Great post. And all too true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that happen though. Being on a job where all sorts of time and planning is put in to make things convert smoothly and when they actually do, instead of getting the praise you expect the return is a bunch of griping that it wasn’t such a big deal after all.
A recent example, when we moved out headquarters to a new building, our entire network head end was being moved to another city with new data lines, new IP addresses, etc. We were able to make the turn around in 4 hours, with some configuration woes from AT&T that made some services unavailable to the remote offices for less than a day. When I talk to IT folks about it, there are congratulations and praise. Anyone outside of that field doesn’t get it. They don’t realize that when we don’t plan and spend money in the areas we see necessary, the system fails. When we do, and it works without a hitch, it’s assumed we’re goofing off, go figure.
I don’t think we’ll ever live in a world where it’s fully appreciated the work that’s done “under the hood” so to speak. But perhaps that’s the best analogy. We’ve all probably felt ripped off by that mechanic that charged us 80 bucks just to replace a friggin sensor, perhaps that’s what we look like to those outside of the field.
Bottom line, if you’re serious about your company and serious about providing the best service to your customers, spending on IT is not just a must, it’s a really wise decision in improving productivity, infrastructure and security.
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