A few hours before the year ends

Heritage Park has the Christmas lights up. The "it's a dry cold" jokes are running on schedule. Downtown thins out around the eighteenth, and by the twenty-second the entire Calgary energy industry has decided it can deal with whatever is on fire after the third. This is the few hours before the year ends, when a small number of operating decisions are worth making while you can still get someone on the phone.

The end-of-year IT decisions worth making before the calendar resets - and the ones that should wait.

The last two weeks of December are the wrong time for most decisions. They are the right time for a small number of them. Telling the two apart is the work.

(Speaking of getting someone on the phone in late December: the answer for most of Calgary is "try after January 7th.")

Year-end pressure pushes operators to do things that feel responsible but mostly aren't. The Q4 vendor pitch becomes a "let's get this booked before year-end" pitch. The deferred project becomes a "we have to start it before fiscal year close" project. The cyber tool that didn't get bought in March suddenly has end-of-year pricing. None of these are good reasons. Use-it-or-lose-it budgets create the same dynamics on the buyer side. Both are bad.

What should wait

Anything that requires significant change-management discipline to land well. The first two weeks of January are when teams come back without context, with the holiday lag, and with whatever priorities the planning process decided in November. A new tool you forced into the budget on December 22 lands into that environment. It won't get the attention it needs to be useful, and six months later you're paying for something nobody adopted.

Same logic for vendor changes, organizational structure changes, and anything that touches how teams work day-to-day. Defer to January at the earliest. Better yet, defer to whenever the actual leadership focus is available to make the change land.

What should not wait

Auto-renewals that need to be paused. If a contract is rolling at year-end and you're not sure it should, pause it now and reevaluate in February. Most vendors will hold pricing for 60 days. The ones that won't are signaling something about how aligned they are with you. The auto-renewal that goes through unnoticed is a year of cost you didn't decide to keep paying.

Security incidents in progress. Anything that's been on a "we'll get to it in the new year" list and has a security implication should not roll into January. Patch gaps. Suspicious account behavior that hasn't been investigated. Backup tests that haven't been done. Holiday windows are when threat actors are most active because they know defensive attention is reduced. The work to close these is small. The cost of leaving them open is asymmetric.

Documentation gaps from departed people. If anyone with critical context left during the year and the knowledge transfer wasn't formal, the last two weeks of December are a good time to find what's missing while it's still recoverable. People remember what they used to know better in the immediate term than they do six months later.

What the year looked like

For operators broadly, 2026 was the year artificial intelligence stopped being a separate budget conversation and became part of how every system was evaluated. The cyber threat picture sharpened without changing fundamentally. The M&A environment compressed timelines while expanding the diligence depth available. Most of the operational gaps that mattered were the same gaps that mattered last year. The fundamentals don't move quickly.

Quiet weeks ahead. Use one of them well; let the others actually be quiet.

This issue of the Operator's Brief is operator pattern recognition from Vencer Group's work with mid-market businesses across industries and geographies. Not industry-specific advice. Read accordingly.