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Navigating the Tech Hype in 2024: Choosing the Right Path for Your Business

Louis Ridout
Celsior Technologies

The first step is for companies to take a close look internally at their business and the direction the business is heading. What are the business goals, and how does the business plan to achieve them? It's essential to determine the path to success and the steps required of people, processes, and technology to reach those milestones. Only then can businesses identify the areas where technology can play a crucial role in supporting these goals.

A thorough examination of people, processes, and technology will help you identify areas where innovation can be a catalyst for business growth. As you meticulously analyze your goals, you will be able to develop a custom roadmap of potential projects to chart the course to future success. Of course, these projects must be evaluated from an ROI and possibly an NPV standpoint to determine which ones are worth doing. Once you identify the most worthwhile projects from a theoretical standpoint, you will next need to identify practical gaps or impediments to implementing the projects.

Some of the more common gaps or impediments are skills gaps, capability deficiencies, and funding problems, which require further internal analysis.

The funding component is ubiquitous and must be addressed. Often, relying solely on the corporate budget will not be sufficient. This is where tough decisions come into play. Countless organizations have failed due to issues related to funding. If the lack of funds influences you to make decisions based on an inadequate budget without considering the downstream impact, you risk becoming diverted from the path you've created, thus resulting in a partial or ineffective technology solution.

Additionally, funding that is not secure can result in the dreaded "bridge to nowhere" with a partially completed effort gathering dust and rust. One approach to avoid this is to look internally for areas from which you could free up budget dollars to augment your corporate-approved funding. Perhaps you can phase out older, costlier, less effective technology to make room for innovation. Look at outdated technologies and functions that are not delivering the desired business value. Next, consider reducing, eliminating, or outsourcing them and earmark the savings for your new strategic efforts.

Skills and capability gaps represent another dilemma you will face.

Do you develop these skills and capabilities internally?

Can you afford to do so?

Should you use vendor partner(s) for this?

Most companies will land on a hybrid model where critical skills and capabilities are at least partially in-house, and vendors are used strategically. Vendor models may include training of internal or external personnel, staffing augmentation, and SLA-based solutions. If you use an outside vendor, make sure that they have a do-it-with-you philosophy that avoids loss of control. To the extent that it is important to you, also make sure that your contract has provisions for appropriate knowledge transfer back to your own organization so that you are not captive to your partner.

Finally, businesses must remain focused on their unique goals and aspirations. By carefully examining internal capabilities, making tough decisions, and selecting vendors strategically, companies can navigate the ever-evolving tech landscape and position themselves for success in the digital era.

Louis Ridout is Director of Customer Solutions at Celsior Technologies

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Navigating the Tech Hype in 2024: Choosing the Right Path for Your Business

Louis Ridout
Celsior Technologies

The first step is for companies to take a close look internally at their business and the direction the business is heading. What are the business goals, and how does the business plan to achieve them? It's essential to determine the path to success and the steps required of people, processes, and technology to reach those milestones. Only then can businesses identify the areas where technology can play a crucial role in supporting these goals.

A thorough examination of people, processes, and technology will help you identify areas where innovation can be a catalyst for business growth. As you meticulously analyze your goals, you will be able to develop a custom roadmap of potential projects to chart the course to future success. Of course, these projects must be evaluated from an ROI and possibly an NPV standpoint to determine which ones are worth doing. Once you identify the most worthwhile projects from a theoretical standpoint, you will next need to identify practical gaps or impediments to implementing the projects.

Some of the more common gaps or impediments are skills gaps, capability deficiencies, and funding problems, which require further internal analysis.

The funding component is ubiquitous and must be addressed. Often, relying solely on the corporate budget will not be sufficient. This is where tough decisions come into play. Countless organizations have failed due to issues related to funding. If the lack of funds influences you to make decisions based on an inadequate budget without considering the downstream impact, you risk becoming diverted from the path you've created, thus resulting in a partial or ineffective technology solution.

Additionally, funding that is not secure can result in the dreaded "bridge to nowhere" with a partially completed effort gathering dust and rust. One approach to avoid this is to look internally for areas from which you could free up budget dollars to augment your corporate-approved funding. Perhaps you can phase out older, costlier, less effective technology to make room for innovation. Look at outdated technologies and functions that are not delivering the desired business value. Next, consider reducing, eliminating, or outsourcing them and earmark the savings for your new strategic efforts.

Skills and capability gaps represent another dilemma you will face.

Do you develop these skills and capabilities internally?

Can you afford to do so?

Should you use vendor partner(s) for this?

Most companies will land on a hybrid model where critical skills and capabilities are at least partially in-house, and vendors are used strategically. Vendor models may include training of internal or external personnel, staffing augmentation, and SLA-based solutions. If you use an outside vendor, make sure that they have a do-it-with-you philosophy that avoids loss of control. To the extent that it is important to you, also make sure that your contract has provisions for appropriate knowledge transfer back to your own organization so that you are not captive to your partner.

Finally, businesses must remain focused on their unique goals and aspirations. By carefully examining internal capabilities, making tough decisions, and selecting vendors strategically, companies can navigate the ever-evolving tech landscape and position themselves for success in the digital era.

Louis Ridout is Director of Customer Solutions at Celsior Technologies

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...