I can point to very few IT systems that are actually increasing our value. They are necessary because it’s hard to run a 300 employee investment bank using just excel and outlook, so they sort of are. If you look at the per employee performance, however, it is down compared to when the organisation was just using excel and outlook. This is despite getting a lot of neat systems that work well, but they obviously don’t work well enough. Which is probably combination of the implementation among employees, the lack of custom fits, the lack of integration between different systems and of course some of the systems themselves.
As far as where we run things, well, no. Things aren’t better in azure than they were 20 years ago when it was run on a server in the basement. It’s not even cheaper per usage. But a lot of this comes to how you buy these things in enterprise. Our biggest expense is never going to be anything but the windows licensing, the rest is sort of just added on. Right now Azure is getting too expensive to compete, so we’re likely going to leave, but it’s not like it really matters for the organisation beyond the budget. We could run things on raspberry pies tied to a racoon who’d power them from the movement it makes while it attacks random people in the IT department and the organisation wouldn’t care as long as it worked and was cheaper than it’s competition.
