It Directors - How do I Respond to the Recession

So, you know, let's get into IT and talk about how IT and you know, I should probably say IT and procurement, you know, IT procurement or vendor management, how they can respond to the recession. And so the first thing is I like to understand words and I think the words, words themselves are very important. And you know, when you look at an emergency, the definition of emergency is a sudden, urgent, usually unexpected occurrence or occasion requiring immediate attention or action. And a crisis is a time of intense difficulty, trouble or danger. So if you think about it, in IT emergencies happen every day and IT is good at handling them. You think about, you know, systems going down or, you know, end users getting locked out of, you know, password resets and all the emergencies that happen in the day to day operating of an IT business. IT organizations and their partners in procurement are really good at handling those sorts of things. And a crisis, a recession is a crisis, is just a sustained emergency. And so you can control what's going on. You can't control that the recession is going on, but you can control how you respond. You know, no different when there's, you know, security issues or whatnot in it. You can't control that, that that's happening, but you can control how you respond to it. And so the key thing I want to get across today is, you know, don't panic. Making decisions or not making them can drive you into a further state of emergency. And so the reason I say that is a lot of the times, what's going to happen? And we saw this in 2008. We saw it with, you know, the early parts of COVID is people started to panic and they just didn't do anything. They were afraid to call their vendors and have conversations with them. You know, just they, they froze in inertia. The same thing happens on the vendor side, by the way. Your vendors are afraid to call you because they know, you know, the recession's coming, budgets are getting hit, they're trying to sell you more and they don't want to have those awkward conversations no more. You do. And so they freeze and they panic internally, which causes, you know, all kinds of roll down effect for them. And so, you know, one of the things that I like to say is we should examine the past to see what we can, can do or what will or won't work in the future. And you know, if you look at the 2008 crash, you know, the 2020 Covid, 2008 had some lessons for us. You know, the same sort of things happened. Layoffs were happening, drove less seats and true ups, you know, how the vendors react, increased prices, more audits, those sorts of things. But it's not necessarily a great proxy though, because it was a different world back then. In 2008 was still pretty much a primarily all on premise cloud concepts. You know, cloud companies were just starting. I think Salesforce probably was one of the bigger ones back then, but, you know, O365 and Azure and AWS and those things weren't there. And so although it has some lessons, it might not be a great proxy because when you're talking about, you know, in the cloud, I'm in AWS or Azure and I gotta cut those bills. Well, if you're running services up there, how do you cut those bills? It's not quite the same as, you know, hey, we, you know, we don't have 3,000 people anymore. Can we reduce our license counts in that conversation? Right. During COVID it was seen as a leader to get through. I think, you know, usually IT departments struggle during these times, but in Covid it actually was seen as the hero, you know, with the rapid shift to work from home and the response and things like that, you know, so I think that going into this recession, it will be leaned on again, you know, digitalization programs and deeper productivity and cost cutting can be driven from it. And so I think that it has an opportunity to continue to lean on that leadership position that they gained during COVID And if you think about the types of things that you may or may not have done with your vendors during COVID what worked, what didn't work, what type of conversations did you have and whatnot. And so the main thing that I want to talk about is that this really is a mindset. And I have a mentor, Brandon Dawson, he always says to me, mike, what you think is what you say, what you say is what you do do, and what you do defines your outcomes, right? And so the key thing is you want to be thinking positive about what is happening, what you can do, how, how you can do these things. Because if you get stuck in that negative, you're going to get stuck in the inertia. And so one of the first things that I say is when, when a crisis happens and when, you know, the recession starts to impact, impact your business, you want to ask yourself questions like these, right? You know, so what's your mindset during the cr. The crisis? Is it positive or negative? It, like you said, you can't control that it's happening, but you can control how you respond to it. So can you be Positive? Yes, we can get through this. Yes, we can go and find savings. We can change our contracts, we can make these changes in our architecture that will drive savings on AWS or Azure and things like that. What's the mindset of the company? What's the mindset for your direct team and boss? Because that's going to impact you. If it's positive in the same alignment with you, then it's going to be much easier. If it's not, then how do you help them get to that positive mindset? Are you prepared for an emergency like this? Like I said, what did we learn in 2020? What did we learn in 2008? How can we be prepared for this? How can we get ahead of it? You know, how focused are we on outcomes that we need to drive? A lot of the times it's like we saw it during COVID we just need to save money. But they had no kind of quantitative, you know, we need to save X. It's just we need to save money. There was no real focus on what the outcomes are. Want it was was that, you know, get out of a vendor, renegotiate a contract, consolidate whatever the various opportunities are, you know, how prepared are you to deal with the disruption and the challenges, Right, because you have your day job to do and then you're going to have, you know, this responsibility on top of it and it's going to be a challenge and it is going to be disruption. And, you know, so how have we trained for this in the past? What can we take from dealing with other IT emergencies that we can bring into into this? And then, you know, we've already talked about what's in in 2020and 2008 taught us.