I haven't been asked this, but, hey, it could happen. Businesses ask for five year plans for long-range planning reasons. And sometimes, IT gets asked this as well. And IT is what you call a fast-moving field, and five years is a long time. So. Now what?
At WWU, if you had asked me that I probably could have given you one. Our core mission doesn't change, educate students, thought the details of said can shift on those timescales. My five-year crystal ball could tell you:
For my current employer, a company best described as a startup, five years out is so far over the planning horizon as to be beyond a singularity. Our industry is in the beginnings of the consolidation phase, and when that happens... five years is enough for the eDiscovery field to go from over a hundred companies earning over $1M/year to thirty companies over that line, but a few over the $1Bn line. Who knows what side of that we'll be on!
Any five year plan I produce will be either a heinously complex contingency tree, or a statement of desire. I have vastly less confidence that what I lay down now will be close to what we come up with five years down the line.
Because there is a chance we might be one of the billion-dollar players in five years, I'm keeping scalability firmly in mind. But, that's what I'm doing right now, not what I'll be doing five years from now.
Is it impossible to come up with a five year IT plan in a startup? Not at all, but what the likes of us would produce is not even remotely like what the likes of, say, the Red Cross would come up with.
At WWU, if you had asked me that I probably could have given you one. Our core mission doesn't change, educate students, thought the details of said can shift on those timescales. My five-year crystal ball could tell you:
- What major storage systems we've replaced and how the new ones perform
- What our backup and disaster recovery systems look like
- What our authentication regime looks like
- What our monitoring setup looks like and how effective it is
- What improvements we've made to uptime and overall reliability
For my current employer, a company best described as a startup, five years out is so far over the planning horizon as to be beyond a singularity. Our industry is in the beginnings of the consolidation phase, and when that happens... five years is enough for the eDiscovery field to go from over a hundred companies earning over $1M/year to thirty companies over that line, but a few over the $1Bn line. Who knows what side of that we'll be on!
Any five year plan I produce will be either a heinously complex contingency tree, or a statement of desire. I have vastly less confidence that what I lay down now will be close to what we come up with five years down the line.
Because there is a chance we might be one of the billion-dollar players in five years, I'm keeping scalability firmly in mind. But, that's what I'm doing right now, not what I'll be doing five years from now.
Is it impossible to come up with a five year IT plan in a startup? Not at all, but what the likes of us would produce is not even remotely like what the likes of, say, the Red Cross would come up with.