WATCH · Tech Leadership & Boards_
You Know What Your Insurance Covers. Not Your Technology.
Saleem Beg · Founder, Teque
● 1:45 · Posted 3 months ago
KEY TAKEAWAYS_
- Deference to technical complexity has become a habit — scrutiny gets treated as bad manners
- You don't need to understand the technology to ask whether it's earning its place
- Ask your IT provider to rate every system: business-critical, useful, or legacy
TRANSCRIPT_
Most businesses treat their technology the way they treat insurance. A necessary evil. Pay for it. Hope you never have to think about it and absolutely cannot explain to anyone who asks. The difference is you know exactly what your insurance covers. You can tell me the excess, the exclusions, the renewal date. Try doing that with your technology state. Most CEOs I've spoken
to can't tell me what they actually own, what they're paying for that nobody uses, which systems are operationally critical, and which are legacy weight. Why has this been allowed to happen? Well, because complexity is the perfect defense. The moment something feels technical, the instinct is to defer to the IT provider, the internal manager, to whoever seems to understand it. And
that difference becomes a habit. Scrutiny that would be completely normal applied to any other cost gets treated as bad manners when it's applied to technology. The fix is simpler than it sounds. Get a list of everything you are paying for. licenses, subscriptions, contracts, support agreements, everything. Then ask your IT provider to rate each one. Is it business critical?
Is it useful? Or is it legacy? You don't need to understand the technology to understand that answer. And if anything on that list can't be explained to you in plain English, that's the first conversation worth having.
“If anything on that list can't be explained to you in plain English, that's the first conversation worth having.”
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