The transformation trap: Why organizations are trying to change too much, too fast

Organizations can be under huge pressure to make changes to their IT estates.

In particular, there are two drivers of this change.

Firstly, there’s the pressure to innovate.

The rapid advancement of technology and AI coupled with shifting business priorities can put organizations under pressure to adopt the latest tools, with vendor messaging advocating for the speed of adoption.

Simultaneously, ongoing inflation and slower economic growth can mean there is a need to find more cost-effective solutions.

Secondly, there’s the change that is forced.

Operating systems might be reaching their end of life and need upgrading, or there are outages and cyber threats to defend against.

There have also been several recent examples of software vendor prices rising significantly due to ownership changes, like with VMware, and companies therefore needing to find new solutions for their budget and reduce vendor dependency.

However, in dealing with these pressures, the trap companies can fall into is trying to deliver all of this change at once and within a small timeframe.

Yet in doing so, this change becomes harder to manage and the risk of outages and system failures increases.

So, how can they deliver any change that is needed safely? The dangers of too much change at once The main challenge in changing too much too quickly is visibility.

Companies have to oversee complex IT estates – on-prem systems, the cloud , servers, end-user computing, networks – where change is constant and security updates are largely automated.

As this change happens, there are more interactions between older and newer systems, different operating systems, different products, and this means the risk of failure can increase.

Configuration drift, for example, occurs when changes, which haven’t been recorded or authorized, cause a system to drift away from its intended baseline (of how it should perform).