Your IT infrastructure may be more outdated than you think

CEOs and CIOs appear to have conflicting views of the readiness of their organizations’ IT systems, with a large majority of chief executives worried about them being outdated, according to a report from IT services provider Kyndryl.

About two-thirds of CEOs say they’re concerned their IT tools are out-of-date or close to the end of their lives, according to Kyndryl’s survey of 3,200 business and IT executives. Meanwhile, 44% of executives surveyed, including IT leaders, say they have IT systems aged past their expected lifespans.

But in conflict with CEO fears, 90% of IT leaders are confident their IT infrastructure is best in class. Still, IT leaders have their own concerns: Only 39% feel their IT infrastructure is ready to manage future risks and disruptive forces.

The findings “show that while there is a certain degree of confidence from leaders about their ability to deliver against challenges, they also report blind spots and vulnerabilities that cannot be ignored,” the report’s authors write. “Business and IT leaders that recognize this paradox and reconcile it in their decision-making will be in better position for both short- and long-term success.”

Conflicting confidence about IT infrastructure may underscore how CEOs’ and IT leaders’ priorities differ.

Many CEOs want to keep up with the market, including making the most of major IT advancements, while many CIOs may be focused on “keeping the lights on” by ensuring the organization’s existing technology is available and secure, says Edward Kipp, CIO at SDI Presence, an IT consulting and managed services provider.

While achieving balance between operational excellence and innovation is always a challenge for CIOs, the tension laid bare by Kyndryl’s survey results suggests either that CEOs have not adequately elevated their CIOs’ remit or that their CIOs are not as transformational as they should be.

The ‘best-in-class’ fallacy

CIOs may believe they have a best-in-class IT infrastructure, but how it’s used is what matters, Kipp says.

“Best in class, by definition, means something that is the best of its kind in a particular category,” he notes. “Having a best-in-class infrastructure doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best solution available and the best option for an organization.”

For example, a company could have a best-in-class mainframe system running legacy applications that are homegrown and outdated, he adds.

“You may have a finance or [HR] system running on a mainframe that requires a lot of talent and funding to keep running,” Kipp says. “These types of applications can be migrated to modern cloud solutions that require much less IT talent overall and are cheaper and easier to maintain and keep current.”

Best-in-class IT systems can also become outdated fast, adds Josh Hamit, senior vice president and CIO at Altra Federal Credit Union. In the banking industry, for example, fintechs are constantly innovating and changing the rules of the game, he says. No one wants to be Blockbuster when Netflix is on the horizon, he says.

CIOs need to have a “healthy fear” in the back of their minds that risk-averse organizations get surpassed through the rapid pace of IT innovation.

“An organization might be using technology that is largely accepted as best in class in general or within a particular industry, and yet that technology is probably already outdated due to the looming disruptions,” he says.

Constant vigilance

CIOs must constantly evaluate new technologies to decide how they will affect their businesses, Hamit advises.

“As CIOs, it’s incumbent on us to be actively looking for those emerging technologies that might be considered innovative and ‘nice to have’ initially but will soon become the new ‘must-have’ standard that everyone is chasing,” Hamit says. “Part of that balance is also figuring out the technologies that will have the most material impact on the organizational strategy, without wasting valuable time and energy on tech that kind of ‘is what it is’ and does its job well enough.”

While CEOs may worry about the state of their IT systems, the CIO’s job is to assess the risk and reward of updating tools, says Andrey Ivashin, CIO at Dyninno Group, an umbrella company with travel, finance, and entertainment brands. In some cases, deploying new IT systems may create more risk than keeping older IT systems that work well, he says.

Keeping the balance between older IT systems and new technologies requires a constant reality check, Ivashin says.

“In tech, every tool, software, or system eventually becomes outdated,” he adds. “You can be confident in your infrastructure today, but if you’re not constantly reassessing, it’ll catch up with you. Any tech at any given time is just one step away from obsolescence.”

Keeping pace with the business

CIOs need to continually assess their IT systems to ensure they’re still meeting the organization’s needs, he says. “We also need to understand where business is heading and update our architecture and tech stack based on future business needs,” Ivashin adds. “Some systems become useless as business needs change, so instead of maintaining them, we retire them.”

In some cases, it’s the IT employees, not the CEO, pushing for shiny, new IT tools, he says. And in some cases, the CIO may want to allow IT employees to experiment with new technologies to keep them engaged and retain their services, he adds.

For the most part, however, Dyninno Group replaces IT systems based on needs, he says. “We change technologies gradually and focus on areas that really need innovation, as well as make sure the tech corresponds to our growing scale, rather than trying to fix something that is not broken just for the sake of innovation,” Ivashin says.