As companies prepare their budgets for 2020, financial leaders across the world are often looking at IT as one of their biggest annual costs. Additionally, each year seems to bring on steep increases depending on the type of organization and how they invest in technology. The expense is not necessarily predictable either- the more an organization has workloads in the cloud, the more likely the final expense becomes a moving target.
Research shows that the current top three technology initiatives for executives are digital transformation, cybersecurity and cloud adoption. The danger most companies face when thinking about these initiatives is not the cost and complexity of execution. Instead, a higher risk is inaction and not taking steps forward toward these initiatives.
For business leaders, this means determining when and how large of an investment to make each year in technology. One key component to help make these decisions and move the ball forward is to determine the advantages versus the cost.
Understanding how much efficiency can be gained and how much additional revenue can the technology investments help produce is critical. One must also consider the benefit your customers will experience from these investments and technological improvements. The higher risk is not providing this value and realizing the revenue opportunities while your customer is creating a better customer experience.
I have seen first-hand over the past two years where Cyber Advisors had invested in our internal technology and processes, and the top beneficiaries ended up being our employees and clients. The investments we made increased our efficiency, allowed us to take better care of our clients and produced higher quality business intelligence to our leadership team. When considering this, had we decided to not increase our technology investments we would undoubtedly have fewer expenses, but we would also not have the increase in customer and employee efficiency that we are experiencing today.