The Cost of Inaction

My father always said, “If it's working, don’t fix it!” It is great advice, and I still adhere to the principle of not fiddling with things that do not need fixing. However, in life and my career, I have encountered scenarios that cannot be left unattended for too long.

Here are a few examples:

Your Quiet 2-Year-Old

We all know that feeling: Your toddler is quiet. Too quiet. Initially, it seems like a moment of reprieve, where you can relax, thinking they are quietly amusing themselves and you're not needed. Yet, upon inspection, you find they've drawn lines all over the walls, furniture, and your new flat-screen TV with a permanent marker! All parents have an internal reminder to check up on their kids when they get too quiet.

Great Bespoke Software

Sometimes in an organization, you have superb software. It functions well, requires minimal maintenance, and was custom-built for your company. Then, Microsoft announces another OS upgrade, and it becomes the best marketing campaign since “diamonds are a girl's best friend,” convincing your users that an immediate upgrade is necessary. However, your excellent software isn't compatible. So, you delay premature upgrades and extend the life of your current OS for a few more years. Eventually, you are faced with expiring OS support and legacy software that lacks a roadmap to support a new OS.

Sweating Assets Past EOL/EOS (End of Life/Support)

During my tenure at a bank, one of our projects involved upgrading redundancy for our Internet Banking services. Everything was prepared for the switchover, but due to Internet banking's 24x7 nature, our change control requests kept getting declined by stakeholders unwilling to allow even 15 minutes of downtime. This situation escalated until the production infrastructure was at risk of failure, and there was no supporting SLA in place to bring it back up. We had mitigated all risks with an innovative design, but it was useless unless we could implement it!

I was reminded of this when I saw a recent audit completed for a client. They have assets that have surpassed their support dates by more than 10 years! Not just one asset, but many! While this might be acceptable in any environment, if you can manage the risk and offer a similar replacement asset within an agreed SLA.

Capacity Management

Remember when you first experienced faster internet after a bandwidth upgrade? It was fantastic! However, over time, you might notice a slowdown until one day things are painfully slow. This happens when your bandwidth is consumed by multiple devices competing for their share of it. While it is permissible to keep adding devices that utilize the internet, there comes a point where bandwidth reaches complete saturation. Keep an eye on your usage trends.

Conclusion

The cost and risk of inaction might initially seem exceptionally low, but over time, the risk increases substantially. The sweet spot where action is needed is when the risk is still low, but we have experienced the benefits of leaving things be for a while.

Cost increases during high-risk situations. This necessitates more urgency, dedicated resources, and expedited timelines for resolution projects. Similarly, the longer issues are left unaddressed, the greater the chance that costs will escalate with increased risk.

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Table Data source: Sintrex Asset Management Module