Transform What’s Next: The Time Value of Technology

How many times in your life have you heard the saying, “Time is money”? Time is valuable, and it’s one of the scarcest resources we have.

Calculating the business value of IT productivity and making the broader organization aware of the opportunity costs associated with certain IT activities is an essential part of any modern CIO’s role. Businesses cannot launch new products and services if the majority of their ITOps or developers’ time is spent fighting fires and troubleshooting. Mean time to resolution (MTTR) matters because MTTR is a leading indicator of how much “innovation drag” a business is experiencing. Time saved on routine IT maintenance/troubleshooting can translate into more time for the CIO and their skilled technical team to innovate.

Strategically Invest in Technology

When the pandemic first occurred in the U.S. in March 2020, many CIOs received what amounted to blanket approval overnight to lift and shift to the cloud. Legacy systems that had been in place for 20 years suddenly weren’t accessible from home, and so they were replaced by more modern SaaS-based solutions.

However, transforming into a pandemic-ready organization overnight wasn’t free. And from recent discussions with analysts, journalists, and IT leaders, it has become clear that the metaphorical IT budget belt is tightening again. More pressure than ever is being placed on CIOs and CTOs to identify specific and measurable business benefits from the technology investments they chose to make during the height of the pandemic.

For those that are doing the math, strategic investments in technology mean time saved that ends up paying off, big time. Paying for software and services to help transform your organization into a more future-proof and resilient organization might result in an initial upfront cost, but will leave your organization with a reduced total cost of ownership in the long run.

3 Things to Consider as Your Organization Looks Ahead to Its Technology and IT Needs in 2022 and Beyond 

1. Align IT tool and budget asks with key business initiatives for expedited C-Suite approval. Every business today needs more performance from their IT, yet many business leaders refuse to dedicate more resources to their tech stack and team. This mismatch often stems from IT making specific technical demands that seem disconnected from the business’s strategic priorities. To secure funding, IT teams need to learn the language of the business and demonstrate ROI in a way that makes sense to business leaders who may not be familiar with certain technologies or terms. If CIOs are able to present a scorecard that shows the impact certain IT investments have made on overall business productivity or the employee and customer experience, for example, additional IT requests become much more palatable. 

2. Invest in solutions that free up engineering time before committing IT to innovation initiatives. IT can and should be a source of innovation for the business. However, IT teams often have to spend full days fighting fires or assembling manual reports. What would these teams become capable of if they had free time available each day? Every minute spent restoring a system to its baseline is time that could instead be spent pushing the envelope to transform how an organization does something, or what’s possible in the future.

3. Assign a cost to time savings and build it into vendor evaluation criteria.  Time is the most important resource we have as both businesses and individuals. Yet not enough effort and attention is spent on measuring the impact of time spent and saved within an organization. Count how many outages your organization experiences every year. How many engineering hours does it take to locate the source of an outage and get everything back up and running? How much revenue is lost while your systems are down? Internal resources are not “free”, and outages may be more costly than you realize. If a vendor observability platform comes with AIOps and automation capabilities designed to prevent outages or surface anomalies that may cause outages in the future, what are the cost savings associated with those features?

To truly understand and maximize the time value of technology, achieving observability across the entire tech stack is a priority. The most successful modern CIOs are those who have achieved observability and know how to measure, prove results, and pass those findings on to the business. Here at LogicMonitor, we make software that provides CIOs with the observability they need to prove ROI and drive better collaboration with the business.