Change is Hard!

Change is the only constant in the IT world.  The products that we buy today that are suitable for our needs can become difficult to maintain, difficult to secure, and may lack modern features tomorrow.  Every year and budget cycle we evaluate our software subscriptions, our leases, our telecommunications, our providers, and our assets. Or are we? Do we resist change?  Is that server good enough to go one more year?   We are here to tell you that change is all about managing your risk because of a fear of loss.

Why don’t we switch IT providers as easily as adding a Netflix subscription?  The reason… it’s not easy to evaluate all of our providers.  It is a big undertaking that takes time and resources to accomplish and that doesn’t eliminate the risk of failure or loss.  Hence why change is hard.  We fear loss.  We fear the loss of control of things we manage or things we are comfortable with. So how do we evaluate changing our providers?  For some things, it’s pretty easy because it is a commodity.  Do I keep Netflix and drop Hulu?  The cost analysis is pretty easy.  For other things we need to be more formal and more detailed to get the value we desire. For instance, do we want to be more secure, do we want to be able to grow faster, do we want to save money? Etc.

Large organizations minimize their risk by issuing requests for proposals with formal processes and vendor selections.  For public institutions, these are almost a given for a large enough purchase.  For small-to-medium-sized businesses, this may be too time-consuming, so they just request proposals from a few vendors.  But without those large business processes, how do you know that you are comparing apples to apples or minimizing your risk?  You may ask yourself: do they know my line of business?  Why is one so much more expensive than the other?  Why do I have to pay monthly?  There are many questions that you start to ask yourself to eliminate that fear of loss.  

This blog series will walk you through a process for changing your IT provider and ways to become more stable, agile, and secure within your organization to eliminate the complexity of change.

Concensus provides complete cybersecurity, managed IT services, and IaM solutions for your business. Reach out to our team for a consultation.

This is the first in our blog series of, “What’s stopping you from changing IT Providers.” Click below to read the second installment, “Getting Started”.