I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I rarely make them. Actually, I can’t recall the last time I made one. College perhaps?
Why then this post to start the year?
For three reasons:
- I’ve got a (somewhat) captive audience. We’re generally more open to change at this time of year than we are at any other point throughout the year, except perhaps on our birthdays. Just look at the volume of tweets generated over the past couple of weeks including the hashtags #2014, #newyearresolution or #resolutions, or, in the IT sphere, tweets with the hashtags #ITresolutions, #ITregrets, #2014techtrends or #2014techpredictions. We want to be healthier, kinder, smarter, more efficient, more valuable, etc., and the New Year provides the proverbial blank slate to start fresh.
- Change is inevitable. We grow older, markets and trends shift, technologies run their courses, new competitors emerge, etc. Being indelibly wedded to an idea, trend, technology, product or a way of doing things bounds options, and this isn’t healthy for you or your business. Data protection not excluded.
- 2014 will be the year of the battle cry for protected storage to meet service level objectives (SLOs), and this is just as much a people/process story as it is technology/product story.
So, before the holiday break, I clicked on a link in an @HarvardBiz tweet, which led me to Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar. It’s a thought provoking, strategy-challenging read—and, importantly, it’s the genesis of this post:
- The 2014 resolution your organization can’t afford not to make is determining where your center of gravity lies (upstream with products or downstream with customers) and taking concrete steps to tilt it in the right direction (downstream).
Short on time?
No worries. Over the next few posts, I’ll highlight some of Dawar’s more salient points as well as don my analyst hat to explore some of the broader implications of this tale for IT and data protection more specifically. Together, we’ll connect some important dots.