If you’ve worked in any data-centric role, you’ve probably experienced the effects of the proverbial “mandate from on high.” Someone in the C-suite decides it’s time to hop on the latest shift in the tech landscape—whether generative AI, hybrid cloud infrastructure, or remote work—and now it’s time for the entire tech department to make it happen.
In the subsequent rush to please the C-suite, organizations often skip steps to effective IT modernization. Teams may rush to buy the latest technology and worry about implementation later. This usually creates tech debt or can even lead to dissatisfied middle managers who turn to shadow IT for effective solutions to the latest C-suite imperative. Successful IT modernization occurs at the intersection of the data that informs the efforts and the people that execute them. Let’s look at a few considerations that will help ensure these two keys exist in each modernization effort.
How Connected is the IT/Tech Team to the Business?
In my experience, I’ve seen many IT organizations work in silos. In siloed organizations like this, individual teams don’t have much visibility into the day-to-day business of their organizations. In the worst cases, teams also lack visibility into the highest priority goals of their organizations, for example, cost optimization or modernization combined with cloud migration.
The goal of each modernization effort should be to drive business success. Is the marketing team looking to ideate and develop content faster by implementing an AI tool? The IT team that supports the marketing team should understand this and be able to implement an AI tool with strong content capabilities. Is your company hiring a larger remote workforce? The IT team should have this visibility and be able to scale an enterprise architecture that can support more remote workloads.
This idea of team connectivity is especially important for database administrators because corporate databases have a lifespan measured in decades, compared to apps and tools which often only endure for a few years. Savvy IT teams will leverage current organizational data to inform their modernization efforts. However, if they have no idea which data sets are relevant to current business goals, the IT team could make ill-informed decisions and invest in the wrong technology. IT modernization is a team effort in which all parties have visibility into each department’s goals and how any new technology maps back to those goals.
Do You Understand the Full Capabilities/Expertise of Our IT Team?
A mandate for IT modernization doesn’t always mean the team has the complete expertise necessary to complete that mandate. It may take some time to arm the team with the correct knowledge to support modernization. Let’s take data analytics, for example. Many modern data analytics solutions, armed with AI, now allow teams to deliver natural language prompts that can retrieve the data necessary to inform strategic modernization initiatives without having to write expert-level SQL. While this lessens the need for writing scripts, IT leaders must still ensure their teams have the right expertise to construct the correct prompts. This could mean training on correct terms for presenting data and/or manipulating data, along with knowing in what circumstances to access that data.
Having a well-informed and educated team will be especially important after modernization efforts are underway. As the team analyzes the performance of the new technology, they must understand which metrics to look for and accurately compare them to previously established benchmarks.
Don't forget that the top targets of cloud-centric modernization, from AWS to Microsoft Azure to GCP, all want you to succeed. Consequently, each of these vendors provide a plethora of learning content online that can improve the collective expertise of your team.
Do You Understand the End-to-End Workings of Your Current IT System?
One of the most important steps to IT modernization is arming your IT teams with a complete picture of the current IT infrastructure. It’s equivalent to giving them a full map before embarking on their modernization journey. In many situations, an ideal starting point is to ensure that any documentation, ER diagrams, and architectural diagrams are collected into a single repository and reviewed. Then, the IT teams use an observability solution that integrates with every part of the enterprise infrastructure to show each team how every part of it works together. This can include both assets that are in the cloud and those which are on premises. It should also include mappings to show which applications send data to each other.
Observability solutions also allow IT teams to modernize securely. In these cases, you should limit the use of certain generative AI tools so as not to expose proprietary company data to LLMs. A clear picture of the entire IT estate may also cause the team to move certain assets from the public cloud to a private cloud or on-premises for even greater security and control. Observability further arms IT teams with relevant data that can inform modernization success and ensure that performance is either the same as or even better than the deployment of the modernized IT infrastructure.
Establishing a Culture Ready for Modernization
Any company that maintains good data practices and supports its people, both in tech and non-technology roles, creates a culture that is ready for any modernization effort. Forward-thinking organizations will work to ensure their data remains clean, accessible, relevant, and understandable for all parties. Further, they will create a collaborative culture throughout the company that easily communicates across teams, one in which IT team members have visibility into non-tech roles, and vice versa. At this intersection of data and people, IT leaders can facilitate a future-proof organization that is always learning and ready to safely and securely execute any C-suite mandate.