“That sounds great, but does it show me the trends?”

That sentence sums up the gist of every conversation I have with Enterprise execs across all industries, from Munich to New York.

It’s a question that expresses the need businesses – and the people who run them - have for clear-cut navigation through increasingly complex and comprehensive infrastructures. At all levels. In all business areas.

The question is born out of equal parts frustration and fascination with the fact that there’s more and more data to be had: Data about finances, customers markets, employees, the lifespan of the average potted plant – you name it, you can find it. And the increasing amounts of data generated by and in your infrastructure can be a quagmire or a goldmine, depending on how well you use it.

Of course, when they ask me, they are not asking me for guidance on how to increase lifespan on the potted plants around the office.

I’m an IT guy, so they ask me how they can be sure their IT stuff is performing well enough, and that they’re not throwing money and manpower out the window.

What the execs are really asking me, when they ask about trends, is:

• How do we know we’re doing what’s right for our business?
• And how do we know whether we are doing it right?
• Too much information

The people who ask these questions are very much aware of the potential blessings and curses of too much information. That’s why they’re asking for a beeline for the gold: The refined, analyzed insights that can tell them how things are going, and whether they need to correct trajectories or boost efforts.

They ask me, because they know ‘All Things Tech’ grow at ridiculous rates – Moore’s Law, for example, says circuit complexity doubles every 18 months. And because the growth is not only in volume, but also in intricacy and density, it’s almost impossible to predict what data processing requirements the business will have 12 months from now.

Having your business generate roughly double the data every two years — data that needs to be processed — puts a strain on your people and their tools. One of the most useful remedies to relieve the strain and keep the engine running effectively is continuous risk assessment and prioritization: the identification of risks and potential, and prioritization of what is need-to-do to keep up, and to stay ahead.

How do you know where to put your money and your manpower?

But how do you or your team know what data to look at, and what is need-to-do, when ‘All That Tech Stuff’ evolves so quickly, and data continues to pile up? Or rather, how can you and your IT team feel confident about what to prioritize in next year’s budgets, if you don’t know what the data is telling you?

To budget and prioritize resources, you have to know more than just which tools you have: You need to know

·       how well you use those tools

·       if they are performing to the best of their capabilities, and

·       if you need different ones, or upgrades to the ones you have.

In the conversations I have with people about how we at CTGlobal can help with data analysis, I hear their concerns about how to deal with all the information that is have available to the organizations.

The questions about how to extract trends arise, once I tell them that it is actually possible to pull data about just about all aspects of your IT infrastructure – compliance, security, hardware costs, software costs, performance, log-in and boot times, and that our software, Insight Analytics, can analyze and visualize it.

You name it, you can pull it, and put it to work.

So the answer to the question in the headline, fortunately, is:

“Yes, it does show you the trends – the trends you need, to keep your infrastructure several steps ahead and stay in control of IT costs.”

Who are we to talk?

The CTGlobal team and I have worked closely with Enterprise client management for the last 20 years, so we have a pretty good idea of what data organizations need to keep an eye on, to keep their infrastructure healthy and the business performing. We have pooled our experience into a pretty simple-to-use tool that enables our customers to skip all of the manual data gathering, data analyzing and representation, and jump right to actionable intelligence that enables them to make decisions based on knowledge, rather than guesswork and hunches.

It makes it easy to monitor progress, document the value of investments, and control and prioritize budgets.

When you are able to establish baselines for your business and follow trend lines, it is pretty straightforward to make business decisions, because you make them based on fact, rather than guesswork.

Watch your trend lines, stay on budget, and have a great day!