So your customer and sales databases are a time-sucking nightmare to administrate, huh? Unfortunately you can’t wake up just yet - you also must maintain deep and complete records of anything related to regulatory, employment or legal issues, and you have to manage these documents forever. (Cue evil laughter.) As Vaclav Vincalek, CEO of PCIS, notes in this interesting article, even the cloud won’t necessarily save you.
Read Vaclav Vincalek on risk and lobbying in system upgrades.
“Changing systems up adds risk and cost. The benefits must outweigh the downsides. “The question that the decision-makers need to ask is this: “is our system working well?” In that case, you’ll be hard-pressed to lobby to change it,” [Vincalek] said.
There are other ways of looking at the problem too. For example, taking a longer-term view, management leaders might ask: “Will this kind of digital transformation enable us to take on a new line of business, or restructure our business model to make it more profitable?”
It comes down to doing an overall cost analysis to see if you’re really justified in changing to a new system. ‘If executives want to make a change just so they can say they’ve modernized their system, without actually bringing benefits to the business, it’s a non-starter,’ he added.”
In a complex modern enterprise, you’ve got datastreams coming at you from every direction. Smart strategy requires that you deprioritize some of it, because there’s usually only one real revenue stream.