Zoom out: Three ways to revitalise your IT investment strategy

In an increasingly complex cloud environment, speed is critical to win. But tech investments can often be piecemeal and siloed, driven by the most convincing business case or the latest “cool tool” on the market customers feel they absolutely must have. IT budgets get pulled in all directions and often the most well-thought-out investment strategy fades away to the background. Some gains are made – but these are marginal and sporadic; and IT organisations the world over are full of siloed artefacts as a result. It doesn’t have to be this way. Investment in the right technology solutions should lead to substantial digital transformation, agility to adopt the latest tech and significant competitive advantage, easing the pressure on IT teams. One way to do this is to bring strategy firmly back on the table, zooming out to prioritise overarching business goals and the role that technology must play in achieving them. Here are three questions decision-makers should ask themselves as a starting point: Am I sure I am getting the most from my existing infrastructure? IT solutions and platforms often bring with them a wide variety of tools – many of which are not part of the core product but get added on through multiple iterations and updates. This often results in an increasingly convoluted IT infrastructure where IT teams may not even fully realise the extent of the tools and services they can deploy. In turn, organizations often find themselves doubling up on some products by procuring additional software to provide functionality they already have but were not even aware of. A recent conversation with a customer comes to mind: the CIO of a well-known media company was looking to build a sustainability dashboard for their IT operations and had an active tender out for almost a year when they came to us with the problem. What they didn’t realise was their existing VMware dashboard could do that sustainability work for them at no extra cost. Once the customer knew how that