Know What You’re Working With
Insights for leaders navigating a digital world.
Welcome to Leading Digital - a three minute read designed to help you ask better questions, make smarter tech decisions, and lead with confidence in today's digital environment.
What are you working with?
If you were asked to assess whether your organisation is gettting a good return on investment for your current technology spend, where would you start?
Typically, the first step would be working out what technology you have in place, and the investment you are making in it. Sounds simple, but who has the list? Usually, this involves a bunch of spreadsheet asset registers and a few exports from the accounting system. Spend a few hours matching those up, and you have a starting point. As an aside, you'll usually find it easier to get a hold of hardware asset registers, since those are needed for the accountants to calculate depreciation.
Next, who is using what? This is where things start to get very murky. Most organisations aren't really keeping track of which areas 'own' which tools. Let alone how much value they are getting from them, and which ones would be catastrophic to lose.
The lack of visibility of the use of technology across organisations makes it difficult to understand the value that's being generated. On top of that, it's often difficult to see the hidden ongoing maintenance costs - some teams are dedicating a whole FTE just to maintaining a CRM, but this might not be taken into account if you're using statistics from a ticketing system to understand maintenance cost.
Often, the lack of visibility adds up to overspend, duplicated functionality across tools, or spending time supporting bits of technology we just don't need anymore. This can go unchecked for a long time - usually, until a new IT Manager or Head of IT comes along and cleans up the old mess.
As leaders, we don't need the details of every SaaS subscription, but we do need to make sure our technology spend is helping us achieve our goals. I've included some questions here that can help you to gauge whether it's time to do a reset, and some actions you can take to prevent tech sprawl.
Leaders have been asking...
Asking great questions is a leadership skill you already have. Here's some questions you can ask to better understand the role of technology for your own organisation.
Your technology estate can get out of hand quickly - especially when new tools are added and the old ones aren't cleaned up behind them. Here are some questions you can use to understand whether things are getting a bit out of control.
A question for your IT Team or MSP: "Can you provide a list of all of the technology tools in use across the business? Do they have business owners assigned?"
A question for your teams: "Can you list the top 5 tools you use to deliver your work, and the key functionality you use?" You would be surprised how often there's significant overlap in functionality.
A question for your IT Team or MSP: "What's our technology lifecycle? What would cause us to decommission a tool?" If there's nothing that would trigger you to remove a tool, there's a good chance you're carrying some extra baggage.
If those questions reveal some blank stares, it might be time to revisit technology procurement and lifecycle management. If we can make those policy and process decisions once, it will save lots of time and money trying to clean things up later.
Take action!
Take 15 minutes to sit with your finance lead and IT lead (or MSP). Ask them to each bring their list of current systems and spend. Compare them. Notice the gaps, overlaps, and differences in where the costs lie across departments or categories. Even this short exercise can surface surprises about what you’re really paying for.
If you're feeling even more ambitious, consider mapping technology tools you identified in the first meeting to each business area or team. Then, ask each of them to review the list and confirm the need for and core use cases for each tool, as well as who is responsible for managing it. That's the first step in moving from cost analysis to value analysis.
Moving from thinking of technology as a cost, to thinking about technology as a strategic enabler marks a big change in leadership. It can be much easier to do with visibility of the return on investment in time saved, quality improvements, and staff and customer experience. The first step in being able to make more informed technology investment decisions is to get visibility of the current state. Re-baselining and setting up conditions for future success will mean you're fast to adapt to new opportunities, and you can keep tech sprawl at bay.
I'll be back in your inbox next fortnight with more on digital leadership.
Scarlett
