Name: 3 Metrics to Guide Your IT Decisions (3T@3 Jan 2026)
Uploaded: 2026-01-27T21:48:51.414Z
Duration: 28 min 20 s
Description: 3 Metrics to Guide Your IT Decisions (3T@3 Jan 2026)

Transcript for "3 Metrics to Guide Your IT Decisions (3T@3 Jan 2026)": Good day and welcome. I want to thank you for joining us here, taking time out of your busy day or week for three metrics to guide your IT decisions. This is our January at three series event. I'm Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global, and I want to thank you for joining us. Before we dive into the session content here today, just a reminder that the audio is muted to avoid any background noise. So over on the right hand side of your screen or the bottom of the screen, depending on how you pick your layout, you'll see a Q and A window. That's the best place to ask questions and answer them. I monitor that during the session. I'll periodically check the chat, but Q and A is best. The session is being recorded and we generally get these things posted onto the website within twenty four hours. Our resources, this session is one of many types of resources we have that you can read, watch or explore in-depth. And we've got some hot links in our resource center now, specifically around artificial intelligence, managed cloud services and cyber security. You can take a deep dive into those. We've correlated our materials as well as information from other trusted experts. So that said, let's dive into our content right now, because today we're going to cover a couple of things when we talk about three metrics we're making by better IT decisions. First, we're talk about the current and trending challenges for IT decision makers and sort of the three pillars of IT that we see for 2026, which are the metrics we're gonna talk about productivity, security and affordability. So what do we mean by challenges? And we really see two types of challenges. There are historical challenges for small, mid sized businesses when making IT decisions. The first and foremost and often overlooked surprisingly is the business value. How will this spending help operate or improve the operation of business? Will it improve things? Will it just is it necessary to do? How do we evaluate that? Lifecycle management. Small, mid sized businesses, you still have to replace those laptops and PCs when they get old, upgrade your network or your internet connection. You've got refresh cycles, updates and upgrades, all of which, some of which could cost money, all of which can cause disruption. Security has always been an issue for IT. How do you keep yourself and your company and your business safe? We're seeing it's also on the trending side, you'll notice, because there are all sorts of new security requirements and challenges out there. We'll dive into that in just a second. Shadow IT. If you're a small business and you've got employees, they may be picking their own tool, something they want to use. It's costing you money. It might be exposing your data illegally or improperly. You might lose control of your data. We've worked with a company who had a salesperson who was putting proposals in a personal Dropbox account. Not only was it on secure, but he went on vacation and a customer called and said, hey. If you can make this quick change, I'll sign. And no one had access or even knew where the file was. And they spent a day and a half chasing this person down on vacation seven time zones away and either getting him to fix it or send the file in a way that could be fixed. It was all this back and forth. Totally unnecessary. And finally, now historical. This used to be trending. Now it's historical. What's your cloud mix? How much you're doing on premise? How much is in the cloud? Where and why? And what does that mean? Who's working remote? Who's working in office? And what's their user experience? The trending challenges are much more timely. First right now, probably the most timely is IT inflation. You might not be seeing it yet if you haven't gone out to buy a laptop or a PC. But right now there's, you know, systemic shortage of processors, graphic processing units, memory, the RAM in your computer and disk drives, particularly the solid state disks that are going into laptops in most computers these days. Where's it going? Those manufacturers are focused on the high margin, high profit, high demand AI industry. It's going into build servers and systems for IA data centers. And in fact, we've got major suppliers of RAM, for example, who have sold a 100% of their production capacity to companies building for AI data centers for the next two to three years. Meaning, they're not you know, the the amount of product available to go into the business and consumer markets is dwindling. Today, a solid state disk drive, depending on your make and model, can cause you anywhere from twice to four times as much as it did just six months ago. The next trend, still artificial intelligence. It's out there. Some of us are weary. Some of us are cautioned. Some of us are against it. Many, if not most of us want to figure out how to use it securely, ethically and morally and properly in our business in a way that improves the way we work and how we service our customers and how we're able to grow our business. It's a hot topic. Those decisions can be complex. Security. It's not just about the rapidly advancing technology of cyber attacks and the need to defend against them. It's also the ability to respond and recover now, given regulatory requirements, contractual obligations, industry standards and even the demands of your cyber insurance carrier. And a lot of that security now is being driven, concerns have been driven about AI. One, because AI can expose security holes and flaws in your infrastructure, but also because the cyber attackers are able to use AI to be more effective against you. And that really comes down to resilience. Know, back in the day it was, oh, you need backup and recovery. Oh, then it was you need business continuity and disaster response or disaster recovery. So if something big happens, you know how quickly you can get your company back up and running minimally and then fully. Resilience is beyond that. It's are you prepared to prevent attack? Can you protect your business? And when something does get through, because something will, not only how you will recover your data and your systems get running, but how you can do the other recovery steps you need to have. And that gets into, again, not just getting your systems back, it's legal filings, legal reporting requirements about breaches and cybersecurity issues in many states, customer communications and accommodations, industry reporting. There are all sorts of requirements. Law enforcement can be involved. Your cyber insurance company and forensics can be involved. So there's a lot more involved in that process now. It's really about business resilience. If something happens, can you isolate it and keep running? Can you mitigate the impact, whether it's a cyber attack or a natural disaster? And then still, how quickly can you be back to full operations in a way that doesn't cripple your business? We know right now still that sixty percent of businesses that have a cyber attack that disrupts their business for seven or more days fail within six months. And so how do you make yourself resilient? So should you be the victim of an attack, you don't fall prey to it in permanent devastating way. So what are our IT metrics? As I sort of hinted earlier, it's productivity, security and affordability. And productivity, we're gonna talk as one about personal productivity for individuals who work for you, as well as the team. Security, again, it's not just do you have the right technology in place. It gets into benchmarking your security, not against what you have today, but against laws and regulations, against your industry standards, expectations and contractual requirements with your customers, including the contractual requirements you have with your cyber insurance carrier. And affordability, most people hear affordability, they think about, oh, how do we save money? Yes, affordability is saving money, but it's also balancing your costs and the value it provides the business. Whereas if you're going to make an IT decision and you're going spend more, but the return on that investment is improved productivity that dramatically outweighs that cost, then you've actually improved the value, your IT environment is more affordable. Because it's delivering more, significantly more for not a linear increase in cost, but a less expensive way to go, if you will. And so we talk about productivity, it's personal and team efficiency. It's really a ratio. What are the results? What is your team able to produce? Whether it's knowledge work or physical manufacturing. Productivity is what is the output? What are the results? Against time, effort and resources. When we talk about time, it's really duration. How much time does it take to do something? So ask yourself when you're looking and making an IT decision, is this going to reduce the time for my team or individual team members to complete tasks? Maybe fewer steps, maybe better access to information, maybe augmentation with automation or even AI. Same thing with effort. Does it reduce the work effort needed for tasks? And effort is the amount of work and the intensity of it. So are we simplifying or reducing steps? Are we improving workflows? Again, AI augmentation or other types of automation can come into play to reduce it. Some people say, well, what's the difference between effort and duration? Well, you can have a task that's really difficult for someone to do and it will take longer because of it. Sometimes they're difficult even though it'll take a long time, but duration gets into things. Well, if there's an exception and someone needs to review it, you're dealing with personal availability. Or if you need feedback from your client or customer before you can finalize something, that adds time and duration as well. So will the new technology, the decision you're making, the change you're making improve shortened time and reduce work effort? The third component is resources. What resources are required? Will moving to this new technology let you reduce other resources, either quantity or cost? And that could be redundancies, right sizing technologies, right staffing, which is making sure that the right people with the right skill set are in the right place at the right time for it. And oftentimes, you can say, gee, we've got this good team, but if we had this technology, these folks over here would be better able to do their job. And it's more tuned to the way they work or their skill set, their education level, what have you. Is it going to reduce or automate approvals is another example, or avoid or mitigate exceptions? As an example, internally, we're in the middle of deploying a new system for developing our proposals that's going to automate things. So there'll be fewer times where a manager has to review what a salesperson has put together for a proposal. And there'll be fewer exceptions that will require research and decision making that may involve other people. And so if we can avoid back and forth internally, if we can avoid some back and forth with our clients, not only will reduce the amount of time it takes in hours or days to get a proposal to our prospective clients or upgrade proposals to our current clients, but it's less work for the sales team. It's less work for the managers and the people overseeing the sales team. And that provides that value. So that's taking a look at productivity. And when we think about productivity, we've used this slide before, part of ensuring productivity is you're making your decisions, you're staying within your one set of tools. Are you leveraging your productivity suite? Do you know what you have? Are you maximizing it? Are you adding a product that's redundant? Does it fit within your IT appropriate use policy? Do your employees understand what that is? The big power of productivity is being extremely deliberate with application and tool selection. Understand how you expect productivity to improve. Make that assessment as part of the decision. Test it if you can. Don't just play around. If you can do a real proof of concept, that's great. Make your selection deploy it, but do so with the education and training so that your team has a lower cost of change and can make the change easier. They understand why you're doing it, how it fits in and how you expect it to improve their productivity. How you expect it to improve their ability to be successful in their roles. If they understand that, they'll buy in and they'll make the effort to learn and take advantage of it. In parallel, can't ignore AI. AI adoption could really help productivity. It can absolutely crash it. We see companies who started to adopt AI. They got a tool in place. They told people to use it, figure it out how it can work. And people are struggling with it. They're spending time trying and retrying and experimenting. They don't really understand how it's going to help them. And so they're actually taking longer and putting in more effort to do tasks because they don't see how AI will help them. So we talk, the key element here is identifying use cases. Be specific. Hey, we're going to put in this tool to do X, Y, and Z as part of this process and the results should be a, b, and c. And that's this is how it works, why we're using it and how you're supposed to use it. And these are the results we're expecting. Take those use cases, pick the tools, make the decision, deploy it, assess the results and refine. If it's not quite going as planned, understand why and guide your users. Maybe it's a user issue. Maybe it's a configuration with the tool, or maybe it's the wrong tool. It's time to take a step back and rethink. When you adopt AI or even any other IT technology, you're gonna have people who are gonna lead the effort and you need them to, to provide that feedback and the followers. Make sure they're sharing their knowledge. So formalize the usage. Set it as an expectation. Be deliberate. If you expect something to improve productivity, everyone should know why you're making the change, how you expect productivity to improve, and therefore, how you want them to interact with the new system. And that'll all come into play. So let's move on to security. Security is not just, hey, do we have virus protection? Security is awareness, prevention of cyber attacks, protection against them when they do occur, being able to recover your systems, your data, your workflows, and being able to respond at the business level to any sort of security issue. And so your business, it's really against your level of resilience against both cyber attacks and mistakes. And you can even look and say, Hey, disaster recovery is a security issue because recovery and response is part of security. It's part of disaster recovery. They overlap. The things you do for business resilience from a disaster recovery or backup recovery component are components of what you need to do for security. So we assess whether an IT decision is going to maintain or improve security. Some of the questions to ask around awareness prevention and protection are, is this going to reduce risk from known and unknown threats? Or is it going to help with, you know, avoid or eliminate chances for system or human error? Will it help reduce downtime, or the risk of failure with our systems or applications or people? Is it gonna mitigate the impact of disasters and unplanned events? Is it gonna improve compliance, regulatory or industry standard or contractual? If you're getting yes to one or more of those questions, you've got a security improvement as part of your IT decision. Think about the backside as well. No system's perfect, things are gonna happen. As part of your security posture, when you're making an ideal decision, is this going to mitigate the impact of disruptions? Meaning if we make this decision and something bad happens, will we be able to continue operating better or quicker and recover our business? So for example, we're talking to a number of small businesses about eliminating all software on the desktop and using virtual application delivery or virtual desktop environments. Why? Because if something happens from a physical standpoint in their business environment or someone ends up unexpectedly out of the office, the user experience is the same. It's in centralized redundant data centers. They can access it. They can avoid a lot of disruption and reduce the chance of reduction or disruption for their time sensitive activities and improve their resilience. Is it gonna improve the time it takes to return to partial or full operations? Is it something that'll simply reduce your legal risks? And therefore, it's sort of an insurance policy, same as reducing your contractual liability exposure. Again, these are the questions to ask. If you're getting yeses if you're getting yeses to one or more of the questions or other questions about security, where you know you're maintaining or improving your security posture, give it a positive check for security as one of your metrics. Stepping back, we want to remind you of our trademark security CPR model that really looks at as a triad communication education, making sure you and your team understand the risks, why you have security, what it is, and what their expected behaviors and actions are. And they understand their responsibility for security activity every day. Prevention and protection, this is when you put in the technology and the processes that can stop on it, that'll prevent an attack or should one happen, protect you from it being successful. And since no protection is perfect, recovery and response is that recovery piece. How do I get my business up and running enough to survive and then back to normal? And how do I respond because there's business issues? There could be law enforcement, forensics investigations, cyber insurance requirements, legal reporting requirements to your state and sometimes the federal government, customer communications, vendor communications, etcetera, etcetera. How are gonna respond? Again, ask the questions. Now, not every decision is gonna have an impact on security. You might do things with, make an IT decision, replacing application A for B. The answer might be, Hey, no change in security. It's just as secure, no more, no less than the other. That's fine. You've done the assessment. You know it's neutral, but you've got to ask those questions to know, is the security metric going to be maintained or improved? Or are we going to inadvertently weaken our security posture? Third up is affordability. Affordability, as I said earlier, isn't just about lowering costs, it's really about balancing cost and value. So consider the costs against the near term or long term value to your business. So where are you looking at? Well, cost, you're going to look at savings and you're going to look at spending and investment. So the first and foremost question, is it in budget? Now we'll talk about this in future events, but most small businesses don't have IT budgets and it's a problem because psychologically, when something's out of budget, it's always an exception. And the framework you use to make decisions is about the fact that it's an exception to what you planned. And therefore it's an unexpected cost, even if it's something that's going to benefit. It's usually in reaction to a problem or to an opportunity that you could have predicted and planned for, but you didn't. So now it's, well, is it worth it for this opportunity? But your focus is on the money more than the value. And so I'll get off the soapbox now and head back in. So ask yourself, is it in budget? Is it something you plan for? Because if it's in budget, you've probably already assessed the value and decided it's something you want to do. Is it going to generate savings, direct or indirect? Is it going to impact what you're spending on IT on an ongoing basis? Is it operating expense or investment? And how does that relate to how you measure your financial metrics and financial success of your business? Right? Which is most important? How do you want to manage it? Is this a one time savings or expense or investment or is it recurring over time? And is that term, if it's recurring or ongoing, near, mid or long term? Ask those questions and you'll say, okay, I'm not lowering my costs, but I'm getting more capability for the same costs or I'm getting three times, you know, the capability or capacity for a 10% increase in cost as an example. And that really gets to the value proposition. Right? What's the impact? When you think about affordable, what's the impact on productivity and security? So yes, you might say, Hey, if we make this change, our monthly cost per user per employee is going to go up by $5 a month, but our risk, security risk, is gonna go down and people can be 7% or 10% or 15 more productive. It's a good value. Therefore, it's affordable. Right? It's not just the dollars out the door, it's the value return. So ask questions about what's the impact on business objectives related to marketing and sales, service, customer satisfaction, operations, logistics, whatever your line of business activities are for your business. And the intangibles, this needs to come in play as well. Is there a market or a marketing value? So for example, we have customers who come to us about implementing a technology because doing so won't really save them money, but the value it adds to their business, it'll differentiate them from their competition. Oh, yes. We do what they do, but we have this neat tool. Right? So, for example, a home remodeling company that has a free three-dimensional rendering system so people can they can create a three d model rendering of what the room's gonna look like after the remodel or the addition is put on And let the customer, their client move around furniture and change color schemes and all that fun stuff versus one who doesn't have that. It's a differentiator. Will it impact customer satisfaction? Will it improve employee morale or an employee experience so you can improve retention and lower turnover? These are intangibles to many expense, but they do have an impact financially and success wise on your business over time. And again, if you're able to say, Hey, this is gonna save us money, or the money we're gonna spend is more than worth it, outweighs I should say, is the money we're gonna spend greatly outweighed by the value it's gonna deliver to the company near term, midterm, or long term, then you're getting a positive check mark for affordability. So we look at affordability, as I mentioned earlier, we'll cover it, we'll dive deep in a future session, budget. Right? Because you'll know, you'll understand your recurring costs and you can optimize those, replacement schedules for, maintenance and upgrades and updates of equipment and services. Investments. This is where you're spending the money and you're doing the ROI analysis saying, we want to make a conscious decision to do it. So for example, for AI, this year, do you know if you're going to add AI to your environment, have you researched and said, we're going to invest this many dollars in these tools and services and we expect over this period of time, some period of time, whether it's near term, midterm, or long term to reap these benefits for the company that make it worthwhile. If you have a budget, you're thinking that in advance, not on the fly. And obviously, you'll probably want to separate capital from expenditures for financial reporting purposes. And from all that, you can build an action plan and act against. If you have an IT budget, you've done the productivity, affordability, and security analysis as you built the budget, not in response to a crisis that you're addressing or an immediate need and not in response to someone coming to you with an opportunity. Saying, hey, our biggest competitor just did x, we should do x as well. Okay, now you're scrambling to figure that out. So the oversimplified matrix that some consultants would like to use is how does your decision you think you're gonna make or you're considering impact productivity, security, and affordability? And which ones are positive and which, if any, are negative? So clearly, if you've got two options and one helps all three and one doesn't, the one that helps all three is probably your best decision because you've taken into all those factors. Now, clearly, if you can help two of the three, if you can improve productivity and affordability, even if there's no effect on security, that's still better than saying, oh, this is only going to help productivity, but it's not gonna help other aspects of the business. That's that's sort of the anyone anyone, you know, it's a bigger decision to go forward or not. If you can't identify how an IT decision is gonna help productivity, security, or affordability, so it's none of the three, stop and rethink. You're reacting to a problem or you're gonna jump on an opportunity without fully understanding the impact. Those decisions generally, most of the time, almost always, I'll say, don't go as as desired. I won't even say it's planned because they're not planned. They're reactive, either to a negative or positive, opportunity. But those will not generally not go well. So we think that. So I've covered a lot of ground. We've talked about productivity, affordability, and security. We've talked about them as metrics to use, to assess when you're making an ID decision, how that decision will benefit those three metrics. However you decide to assess and measure those metrics to understand the broader impact on the business. It's a great way to compare options when you're faced with more than one options that making, and to decide if and when to go forward. This is always easier to do in the context of having a plan and a budget corresponding and plan for what you intend to do or what you want to do ahead of time. But it can still be valuable if you are reacting to a problem or hoping to jump on an unplanned opportunity where if you think you take action quickly, you can move the business forward. So I haven't seen many questions yet in the Q and A. So now's a great time to hit the Q and A window and ask any questions you might have. Additionally, if you think about it, we will get this, as I mentioned, posted off the website. Generally, within the next twenty four hours, you can come back in and hit us up with questions later. Feel free to send questions or if you want to talk to someone about your IT leadership and planning and methods and or even dive into our budget resources. If you click on the docs section over on the right hand side of the screen right now, we've got some other resources, some blog posts and ebooks about IT decision making, including we've included a link to our budget template. It's a budget workbook template and the ebook smart IT budgeting pays off, sort of walks you through the steps of using that template. And the slides you've seen today here are there as well. But if you want to get a little more in-depth and you want to dive deeper, feel free to contact us, info@cumulusglobal.com or use the bit.ly, CG intro call or the QR code on the screen to book an initial call with one of our cloud advisers. It's no obligation. We're happy to have a chat, understand your issues, your concerns, priorities, talk about how we might be able to help, you can decide to move forward or just take the advice and go on and handle things another way. Feel free to reach out to me directly. Best way is by email. I don't have an assistant. So if you, send me an email, I can't get can't back can't get back to you quickly, I'll have someone on my team reach out. I'm not good about answering the phone, when I'm busy, and I'm horrible about checking voice mails. So best to send me that email. On that note, still nothing in the QA. So either I've bored you, beyond recognition or I've covered the info well or you're thinking about it, I'll get back to this later with questions. In any case, whatever the case might be, I really do want to thank you for taking time out of your busy day, busy week to join us here live or to be watching this on demand. Thank you very much and have a great day.