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Pau Lo

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ICT budgets and common mistakes (budget wasted)

If you have any responsibilities for managing the ICT budget for your organisations, can you share any examples of lessons learned on areas you may have identified or any honest 'mistakes made' where your company was perhaps wasting money.

We have a risk/audit team who do a lot of good focus on cyber security, data protection etc, but some other issues have come to light in recent years where money was being wasted due to poor asset management/monitoring processes (i.e. smartphones that were not even being used by the person given them), which got me thinking what other common mistakes could be being made which may be worth delving further into as part of their cycle of reviews.

Not overly sure what category to add this to so gone with a broad area as I know a lot of participants in these areas often seem to have senior titles in their profiles so may be involved in this type of area or report directly to others who do.
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Craig Beck
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Pau Lo

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some good pointers, thanks. re "This is horrendous as there is no learning or feedback loop..." could you elaborate a little on this a little on what that would entail in an ideal world where the tech teams have their say/input?
Where decision makers are insulated from the impact of poor technical decisions - and in the example i commonly see is "architecture" teams, the operational guys bear the brunt of a solution that is wrong or poor fit for the organisation - while the operational team gain the learnings from the poor decision.... i.e. what worked and didnt work - and importantly the why and context of why certain bits didnt work....

This knowledge is then instinctively fed into future decision making efforts... in the case where the architecture team is a separate team from the operational teams, then they not only dont bear the pain of bad decision, but also do not gather the learnings from them.

In an ideal scenario, the operational teams have people moving into/out of projects as they are spun up - that way the knowledge stays within the team.

When business requirements are being discussed, a member(s) of the operational team should be present - so they can present current capabilities or existing knowledge of the current network in that area.... something that architecture teams commonly miss - as they are not working in the current environment every day. Too often projects are commenced, only to find that an existing capability exists which is already 80% of the way there...