This post is a bit of an expansion of this post titled; On IT Resistance to Change.
In that post, I documented how IT teams can be the worst at resisting technology changes that counter their preconceived notions of how business technology has been, and to them, should continue to be. The quote I reference in that post is actually that IT seems to like to hug a server.
But lets back for a minute. As a business in the small to medium space, what technology do you need? What does the term technology in this digital millennium mean to you?
To me it means that you need email, and calendars, to contact suppliers, customers or partners.
It means that you need telephone service, again to keep lines of communication open.
Likely that you need to create or consume information in the form of documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
And probably a storage area to keep many of those documents, and possibly collaborative tools to create them.
And so??
If I was writing this just a few short years ago, I would have used the term phone system, or email system when describing these functions or tools. Simply put, when you determined that you needed a particular tool or capability, you had to naturally assume that to obtain and use these tools you needed to include a system of hard drives, servers, cables and racks bolted to floors or walls.
Not anymore.
Sure, we can still use the term system. But we don’t need to assume that this system needs boxes bolted to our floors or walls. Your phone system could be a hosted voice over IP provider. Email and collaboration? Spend 10′s of thousands to bolt a box to the floor, or a few dollars a month and let someone else worry about that?
One of the big keys here is that the direct purchase price of the ‘hug a server’ type of technology, is dwarfed by your annual costs of maintaining, managing, patching, etc etc. Stamford based Technology Researcher Gartner Inc previously put this Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) at up to five times the initial purchase price annually.
This is not to say that there is a silver bullet in any technology strategy. Regulatory or legal reasons may require you to keep your systems in your own facility. The key aspect though, is that your due diligence when considering your technology spend has expanded.
Your options go beyond boxes bolted to walls and floors.
The SMB Takeaway
Next budget cycle, ask yourself if nailing boxes to the walls supports your strategy, or if it is really the tool the box is holding that is the key to that strategy.
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