The Pendulum

250,000 layoffs in Tech in recent months… what were all these people doing that no longer needs to be done? Surely not all ChatBot’s fault… at least not yet…

The pendulum comes and the pendulum goes. When it pauses before coming back, there is no clear warning of the reversal. And typically there are a lot of damages. Are those layoffs sending us a warning on the pendulum’s is peaking?

If you were in charge of payroll systems back in the day, you may have carted boxes of cards to be fed in to a mainframe, data and programs. Turn-around time and costs of those processing centers introduced stiction on the pendulum, it reverted to internal computing centers; you threw away the old programs, and created new ones at great cost.

Those great costs of creation and maintenance reverted the pendulum from in-house programs to software packages. Scrap the programs again, and the data, and pay a third party to supply the programs. ERP it was called. Customized.

Then the costs of keeping those systems in synch with the supplier and absence of customization support sent the pendulum flying in to the hands of SaaS, the latest miracle. And you threw away your investment for a third time, and are now forking out humongous costs each month, and still stuck with your specificities that the SaaS provider refuses to even be aware of.

Could it be that all those layoffs are telling us the pendulum is swinging back. Somebody has stopped buying what they were providing. What else but some form of cloud related offer could they have been working on in such massive numbers?

Michael Dell himself was bragging recently that one of their AI industry clients was saving $2.7M a month by reverting back to a private infrastructure.

So, what should you do to provide your corporation with proper HCM systems? Hold on to your old ERP, go SaaS one-size-fits-all public cloud and lose even the ownership of your data structure if you wanted to leave? Go Private cloud? 

… or, God forbid, install on-premise and take your chances on your internal IT to keep the dragons away.

Here are some suggestions on what you might want to incorporate in your RFP when you go to the market, make them mandatory criteria:

• the system will meet all your requirements without little black boxes and work-arounds on the side
• the system, once installed in whatever technical infrastructure you decide on initially, can be lifted and shifted to another infrastructure without losing the functionalities nor the historical data.

• supplier will support the complete scope of what is installed software-wise and control data-wise.
• demand references of clients who have moved from one technological environment to another with the same software on the business side, without any loss of data.

Then just sit back and look at the pendulum going back and forth, but without crushing your investment. No more risk for you.