Management

Start a New Trend This Season: Fall IT Cleaning

Fall makes a lot more sense timewise for refreshing tech plans and tidying up the infrastructure. Here’s why.

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

Are you wondering about that headline? It’s nearly the fall, you say. Well, that’s my point.

Every spring, magazines, websites and blogs talk up the season as a time to re-evaluate systems, IT plans and tech strategies — to undertake all manner of infrastructure tidying. We caught the fever too with our 2017 Spring Cleaning: Tech Edition.

When you think about it, why spring? Frankly, fall makes more sense. By now, budget planning for most businesses is well under way. IT teams are finalizing spending plans for 2018, and beyond.

Plus, with three quarters nearly under their belts, most businesses have a good idea of how they have fared financially. And, more important, they know which facets of the business are driving revenue and which are not. Business chiefs are making course corrections and deciding where to seed innovation dollars. An IT team has a much better financial basis for revisiting IT strategies and plans — for really giving them a fresh scrub and polish based on where tech dollars should be invested.

Align with Tech Trends

What’s more, for IT, the heavy rotation of conferences and trade shows begins to wind down as the cooler seasons approach. Why does that matter?

It matters because businesses have spent the spring and summer amassing a lot of tech knowledge. IT folks will have roved far and wide, learning how technologies they use are evolving, how other businesses are tackling challenges and how new products might help their particular needs.

Armed with these smarts, they will be able to make informed decisions about what should stay, what needs a tuneup and what should go. Fall makes a great time to weed out that old tech and decommission apps and systems no longer in use — in essence, to start the new year renewed.

There you have it: my rationale for why fall makes a better season for IT housecleaning than spring. And BizTech’s here to help with:

Real-world use cases, like our feature, “The Holiday Data Processing Crush Approaches — Here's How to Handle It,” about how businesses mesh virtualization, load balancing and cloud tools to manage processing spikes
Emerging tech insights, such as our piece about machine learning’s role in helping deliver better data analytics
Product reviews, including our look at the latest Epson BrightLink Pro projector

So what are you waiting for? Get tidying.

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