IT departments often regret technology buying decisions
- Reference: 1657915207
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/07/15/buyers_remose_it_departments/
- Source link:
Fifty-six percent of organizations said they had a high degree of regret over their largest tech-related purchase in the last two years, according to a new survey of 1,120 executives in North America, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific.
"The high regret is at peak for tech buyers that have not started implementation, indicating significant frustration with the buying experience," said Hank Barnes, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. "In the past, it was relatively easy for product leaders to predict who buyers were, but no longer. Buying team dynamics are changing and customers can find buying to be a real challenge."
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Whether or not some regret can be blamed on technology being oversold or buyers being ill-informed is not a point of discussion, but the longer the decision-making took, the more likely remorse was to hit.
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"There can be a significant downside to regret associated with enterprise technology decisions. The survey found that the organizations that indicated they had high regret for their purchase took, on average, seven to 10 months longer to complete that purchase," said Barnes. "Slow purchase decisions can lead to frustrated teams, wasted time and resources and even, potentially, slower growth for the company."
And for anyone left picking up the technical pieces, 67 percent of people involved in technology-buying decisions are not in IT, which means that anyone could be a tech buyer for their organization. This is the so-called lines of business phenomenon where someone in marketing, for example, uses the corporate credit card to buy a product or service that IT admins then have to help manage.
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The trend led to a new "technology chasm" which divides organizations that are confident adopters and buyers of technology from the vast majority that are not.
Gartner also spoke to those selling enterprise technology to address how the "chasm" requires new thinking.
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"To shift strategies, we need to think about psychographics beyond the motivations for buying also to include how decisions are approached and which groups are driving the strategy," said Barnes.
"Gartner has developed a psychographic model called Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs) that revealed seven specific customer segments. Using ETAs is one element that can help high tech providers move from a product/market fit strategy towards a product/customer fit strategy," Barnes said.
Whether anyone has experienced buyer's remorse after shelling out thousands of dollars for a Gartner report is a question upon which The Register cannot comment. ®
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Pseudoscience and bad math.
Classic Gardner style breakdown, "we mashed a bunch of uncorrelated numbers together and then made prognostications on the peaks and valleys of the resulting statistical noise."
As a result you get the perverse conclusion that the problem is how long it took to make a decision. I hate our Cisco phone system, which was quite a bit more expensive than the competing bid. But nobody ever got fired for using Cisco right? We also use them for our network layer, so it made sense to the bean counters on paper, and it was one less vendor for them to track. We even made the non-IT stakeholders go to demo's and training. It went in one ear and out the other, and a decision was made based on non-functional criteria, and as a result we are stuck with a barely functional phone system. This happened because the price tag was high enough we couldn't just sort out the best solution and tell them how much to take out of our budget. Board level approval. So people with no experience or expertise made a decision, mostly on their gut and a 2 page summary, while trying to shield themselves from as much accountability as possible.
With that paragraph of information you can draw quite a few meaningful conclusions. Just listing the dollar amount, time to decision, and regret outcome isn't going to result in a meaningful conclusion, even at the 10,000 ft level. Just end up with the inevitable and obvious, like there is a positive correlation between the cost of a project and the time to decide. Duh.
One Reason
I insert myself into e-waste & disposal routes, is the number of things recovered off the books, untagged & kept hidden by the purchasing Mangler, when it wouldn't work as they expected & wouldn't get IT involved to make it work "For reasons we can guess why", so it is quietly shunted aside & "lost".
After 5 years or so a ticket comes in to remove "surplus" equipment - Leading to a cornucopia of "NOS" delights that "never existed" & continue to cease to exist when the ticket is closed.
Due to immigration I'm still pissed that I had to pass on one of 8 BBC Master Series (Still in sealed boxes) that came in.
The IT department is often the last to know
Far too many IT purchases are actually committed to by some idiot who fell for the sales talk.
Psychographics
I had to look that one up:
"the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research."
I recall many years ago, there was TV advert where a group of supposedly business people were umming and ahhing about an IT purchase when someone held up a piece of paper on which they had written in large letters "IBM", and everyone calmed down. If that is the procurement process for corporate IT then no wonder there is so much 'buyers remorse'.
I do know how they feel, though. Despite all evidence to the contrary, for some reason I think that buying a better (i.e., more expensive) camera will mean I take better (i.e., nicer) photographs. (On the other hand at least with the best equipment I know that the end result is almost entirely my fault.)
Seriously, if you need to spend that long on deciding on a new IT procurement, either you are doing a very in-depth requirements analysis (good) or don't actually know what you need (bad).