Ars asks: What’s stopping your workplace from adopting newer technology?
One of the things I enjoy most about writing for Ars is the opportunity to interact with such an enormous pool of brilliant IT folks. The Ars readership is overflowing with that most valuable of demographics: the proverbial “IT decision maker,” or just “ITDM.” From the sysadmin trenches to the C-suite, you guys do it all—not just turning the wrenches that keep business operational, but deciding which wrenches to buy, too.
But even while so many of us work at businesses whose products shape the future, as ITDMs we also often find ourselves faced with a tremendous number of obstacles when it comes to modernizing our own business tech and processes. You all know the drill, because you’ve all been through it—a new vendor shows up with a product that seems like it would solve so many of your problems, and you’re interested in evaluating it, but the solution they’re pitching gets shot down by a steering committee or design review board because it might require some unforecasted expense to conduct a mandatory IT security audit of the thing. Or because the head of the steering committee once had a bad experience with that vendor three jobs ago. Or simply because it’s different, and here at $COMPANY, we do things a certain way.
Or perhaps you work in a large company with a tremendous amount of “IT inertia,” and change happens as slowly as steering the Titanic. Maybe your company sees current and future IT trends like “edge computing” or the “hybrid cloud” not as desirable directions but as enormous security and regulatory nightmares waiting to be unleashed. Maybe you work in an industry with iron-clad change control requirements; maybe you’re at a Fortune 100 company that is just now starting to consider alternatives to the traditional “datacenter full of servers and SANs” architecture.
Or maybe your company is change-averse because of ingrained cultural issues, or ossified processes, or your boss just really likes doing business the old way with its old set of vendors—no matter how hard you push for a bit of modern devops magic to make business life easier.
We want to hear what it’s like for you
Well, fellow Arsians, we want to hear your thoughts—and we’ve prepared a survey we’d love for you to take. This is the first of probably two or three surveys we’re going to be running across 2019 to try to understand what you value (and what you detest) about your company’s relationship with new technology—and as part of that, we want to know exactly what you’d tell your bosses if you could. Are you frustrated with process garbage? Happy about long-term tech stability and appropriate change controls? Terrified at the thought of throwing the datacenter doors wide and embracing all this new hybrid and edge stuff? Or are you one of the lucky ones, working at a company that you believe gets the balance of all these things exactly right?
Surveys like this are one of the most important things we do at Ars. They provide direct and actionable feedback on the attitudes and opinions of our readers; those attitudes and opinions inform our coverage and help us to understand what we should be writing about.
If you’re an ITDM and you’ve got about ten free minutes, it would greatly help us if you’d take our survey on what you do and don’t like about your workplace’s attitudes toward adopting new technology. And please also feel free to also weigh in below in the comments, too—every little bit helps. I’ve got plenty of sea stories to tell about the ITDM life, and I’d love to hear yours.
Please click here to get started, and thank you!
