by Bryon D Beilman
Summer is approaching and for me it is Triathlon season, because most of them are in open water and it needs to be warm enough to do be in the open water. What this means is that for the past few months I have been logging time running, biking and swimming and during these sessions, I have lots of time to think. It lead me to a few questions that parallel what we do with our customers.
If I had a better bike, how much faster would I go? This applies to shoes, wet suits, dietary supplements or other training aides. Let's take this a different direction.
If I had better IT equipment, how much better would my business run or work?
Now, they are not completely analogous, but for me there is a common answer that works for both. Although equipment (IT or sports equipment) can help, you have to make sure your process or engine is optimized first.
In the case of sports, I like to think, "as soon as my equipment is severely limiting me, then perhaps it is time to upgrade. If I am climbing a hill and I have to switch to a lower gear, is it because my bike needs to be better or is it because my legs need to be stronger? In general, I think it is me (the engine) that needs to improve. When I don't have to shift to that lower gear, but still want to go faster, then perhaps it is the bike.
We see this quite frequently for businesses that are having IT issues and they are concerned that they need to upgrade their equipment. There are many instances where a particular technology is not suitable, cannot handle the load or do what the business needs, but many times it is how it was configured. We have seen customers with very rigid business and process discipline do amazing things with a small inventory of information technology where others who may have significant technology yet do not achieve the same results.
For IT management, if you are experiencing issues our outages, is it because of the equipment you have or how it was configured? You may not know, but a good IT Manager or IT services company would certainly be able to tell you.