Some of the scariest things in ICT don’t involve a cyberattack, a major outage or a system suddenly going down. Sometimes, the problem is much quieter: nobody knows who owns the systems.
There is an application that a department relies on but nobody can say who is ultimately responsible for it. There is a platform that has been in the business for years but the person who originally implemented it has moved on. There are accounts, licences and integrations connected to systems that people use every day, yet no one has a complete picture of who manages them, who approves changes or what would happen if they were switched off. Because everything still appears to be working, nobody sees it as a problem until something happens like; a contract that needs to be renewed, a security issue is discovered, the system stops working, an employee who understood the platform leaves and so on and that is when the lack of ownership becomes visible.
Technology doesn’t manage itself
Technology can be implemented, configured and maintained but it doesn’t manage itself. Someone needs to understand why it exists, who relies on it, what information it contains, what it connects to, what it costs and whether it continues to serve a purpose. Yet as businesses grow, technology ownership can become surprisingly unclear.
“IT owns it” isn’t always enough
It’s the norm to assume that anything involving technology belongs to the IT department but technical ownership and business ownership aren’t necessarily the same thing. While IT may be responsible for keeping an application available, they may not be the ones that decide if it’s still serving the organisations needs.
As technology becomes increasingly embedded in everyday operations, organisations need to understand not only who keeps each system running, but who is accountable for why the organisation has it in the first place.
The technology that nobody wants to switch off
One of the clearest signs of an ownership problem is technology that has simply been allowed to survive. It may have originally been introduced for a legitimate reason but businesses change, employees move on, processes are redesigned and new systems are introduced, yet the various technologies that were implemented throughout all these changes have a tendency to remain without someone making the conscious decision to keep it and this is exactly how an organisation’s technology estates become larger, more complicated and more expensive than it needs to be.
When the person who knows leaves
What happens when the person who understands the system leaves the organisation? This is common in ICT. A particular employee may have been involved in implementing a platform, managing a supplier or building an integration and over time they become the expert in these various technologies. But the problem comes in when that one person / few people leave the company and suddenly the organisation is left with various technologies that no one person really understands or is able to manage successfully.
The cost of unclear ownership
The consequences of unclear ownership aren’t always immediately financial.
Sometimes the cost is time.
Employees spend hours trying to find out who can answer a question, IT teams investigate systems that they don’t fully understand., procurement chases information before a renewal or security teams struggle to determine who is responsible for a particular application.
Sometimes the cost is risk.
An old system may not be receiving the attention it needs. Access rights may not be reviewed properly or a supplier relationship may continue without anyone evaluating whether the arrangement is still beneficial to the organisations.
Sometimes the cost is opportunity.
The organisation may already have technology capable of solving a problem, but nobody knows about it or a business may purchase another platform because the existing platforms capabilities just aren’t understood.
And sometimes the cost is simply complexity.
Every additional system creates another relationship, another supplier, another set of data, another integration and another thing that someone needs to understand.
Without clear ownership, that complexity becomes increasingly difficult to manage.
Ownership should follow the entire lifecycle
Good ICT management isn’t just about knowing who to call when something breaks, it’s about understanding why the technology was introduced, what business problem it solves, who uses it, what it costs and what other systems depend on it and so on.
At Telesa, we believe that managing an ICT environment means taking ownership of the details that are so easily overlooked. As an independent ICT management partner, we approach our clients’ technology environments with the same care, attention and accountability we would give our own. We keep track of what you have, what it costs, who is responsible for it, how it is performing and whether it continues to serve the needs of your business.
Our role goes beyond keeping records or responding when something goes wrong. We help bring structure, oversight and continuity to an environment that can quickly become fragmented across multiple systems, suppliers and internal teams.
