Speed is usually the silver bullet to remaining competitive in a complex cloud environment. What holds back that critical race is the fact that tech investments can be siloed or driven by the latest hype or most convincing business case at that moment in time. There can sometimes be little regard for how a solution or tool will perform or produce savings in the years to come, or simply that IT budgets get stretched thin – both cases leading to the same outcome: a tech investment strategy taking a backseat. It might be that some efficiencies or performance improvements are made, but without proper alignment to business objectives, gains will be sporadic and insignificant. The consequence? IT businesses become virtual homes to fragmented artefacts.
What organisations should be aiming to achieve when investing in technology solutions is substantial digital transformation, a certain level of agility to adopt the right tech and gain a competitive advantage, and reduced pressure on IT teams. This can be possible – by bringing strategy back to the fore, aligning with top business goals, and realising the role that technology must play in achieving them. To get started, IT decision-makers should step back and seek to answer the following three questions.
Is my existing infrastructure providing or restraining the gains the organisation needs?
As organisations accumulate IT solutions and platforms, many will also rack up a variety of tools that aren’t core to the product but get added through iterations and updates. IT professionals will find this compounds an already complex IT infrastructure and that it becomes more difficult to realise the extent of the tools and services they can deploy. As a result, products can get doubled up and organisations spend more than they should as additional software is procured to provide functionality they unknowingly already have.
This topic comes up frequently with customers. A well-known media company had an active tender out for nearly a year as it was looking to establish a sustainability dashboard for its IT operations. They were unaware that they could executive that sustainability work with their existing VMware dashboard with their current fee. There was no need to lay out additional costs, and they could make the solution go the extra mile, once they understood how it all fit together.
You may be surprised at how many tools you already own that already work so effectively. Instead of complicating your infrastructure, take a more holistic view of your toolkit and regularly look at your existing investments to get full value and a return on them.
Is a bespoke product necessary for achieving innovation?
Technologists often believe that building a bespoke tech stack is the best avenue to meet their customers’ specific needs. But despite good intentions, the tech investments made to achieve a bespoke product are piecemeal. These become focused on specific tools and products that are combined to make something completely different, which usually do no work well together and require more work than intended just to keep them ticking along.
Again, step back and reevaluate. There are solutions and platforms out there that remove this headache and help you to get the basics right. Solutions that can be bought off the shelf, deployed quickly, and are scalable so that you can create a centralised development environment that responds to customer needs and delivers on new requirements based on what customers asked for. This is how you can find pockets of innovation in your business and provide more value.
Are my current tech investments keeping the lights on or unlocking innovation?
Innovation can be associated with the urge to adopt the latest and greatest technology on the market, whether that be public cloud networks or generative AI tools. This approach can pay off, but the same level of agility and potentially greater innovation – not to mention a better focus on cost, data sovereignty and security – can be achieved on-premises or in a private cloud environment.
There is the right solution out there for your organisation. Instead of building your own cloud platforms, you should be focusing on layering innovation above that and looking for a solution that has built-in resilience for non-stop operations, threat prevention, and fast recovery from cyber threats. That’s where the real differentiation is.
It can be easy to be swept up with what competitors and the broader market are offering, but think back to the three questions I’ve outlined here to help you better understand your IT infrastructure and what investments you need to make to keep on top of your overarching business objectives.
Nurturing an innovation mindset will help you revitalise your tech investment strategy. Instead of thinking that you need to create a tailored IT solution or procure every new shining toy on the market, the onus should be placed on creating an environment that provides flexibility and agility through the use of reliable solutions, allowing your business to deliver innovation that makes a difference.
Joe Baguley is Chief Technology Officer for EMEA for VMware by Broadcom, joining VMware in 2011. He helps develop and communicate VMware’s strategy and vision with customers and partners, helping organisations to better understand how to use today’s advances in technology to deliver real business impact, reduce costs and better support users and business needs. Joe is a recognised leader within the European technical community being listed in the Top 10 CTOs in EMEA in 2023 by Technology Magazine and considered one of the top 50 most influential leaders in UK IT.