| I run a small IT consultancy in EU mostly for companies with factories, so I have some biases. I have a few issues with the way IT leadership in EU has been running things the past 20 or so years: - Absolutely 0 care for having a de-risked supply chain. In fact, IT leaders are extremely happy to have fewer and fewer suppliers, I think it is even one of their goals! And look at it now, what to do when 70% of your company runs on Microsoft and this happens? - Buy always, no matter what the process is, just buy more tools. So what could have been 1 Python script now is a 5 years contract with yet another US supplier, all data stored in proprietary formats locked under complex APIs of course - Bundle everything, and I mean everything, in the ERP. Make the ERP so big and complicated that adding anything to it requires tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of euros and multiple months of "development" (as an aside, did you know SAP ABAP code is stored in a database???) - Lock yourself up completely with whatever Cloud provider you decide to use. Using AWS? Let's do everything with lambdas! Because, who cares about being Cloud agnostic and de-risking your AWS investment? - Never invest in your internal tech talent, always go after shiny new tech solutions that deliver at best 20% of what they promise, while good motivated employees could have delivered 80% at a fraction of that cost - Never push back on business asking for specific tools just because the vendors of such tools are amazing at marketing. 90% of manufacturing companies could replace Salesforce with much simpler tools (who knows, maybe even EU based?) and save millions. But no, let's go after brands and never consider the actual 1) business process we are trying to improve; 2) the reference architecture; 3) the underlying data we want to do CRUD on The re-thinking of the tech stack is not a US tariffs issue, it is an IT leadership problem, and a serious one. The overwhelming lack of understanding of simple risk management strategies has gotten us here, EU companies should never, ever, have put themselves in this position in the first place. |
I'm not disagreeing, but you are mistaken if you think this is just an EU thing. It's everywhere. I seems to be driven by two things.
One is focus on the knitting - and outsource everything else. Everything else includes your security infrastructure - which you outsource to Active Directory running on Azure, or Okta. Amazing, since both have been ripped new ones in spectacular fashion.
The second is de-risking requires redundancy. Redundancy is expensive, and worse hard. It means you have to deal with multiple suppliers and glue them together. That requires internal expertise, but you just outsourced the external expertise so you could stick to your knitting.