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 Digesting The Technology Elephant By Patricia Schnaidt Remember the picture of the python in the children's book, The Little Prince? It swallowed an elephant and was mistaken for a hat by the Little Prince. It's a dangerous error to make. Have IS organizations become that python, dining on a technology diet of elephant? The python becomes sluggish until it digests its meal. It's not a predator when it's digesting a big meal. It's vulnerable. 
I recently spoke at two Computer Associates' meetings of CIOs and IS executives. At the first meeting, one CIO approached me after the speech, and pointed out that her company wasn't on the leading edg
e and it was just looking for technology to support its business, which was manufacturing camping supplies. The company didn't need the technology to be first, it needed it to work. At the second meeting a week later, another IS executive asked a Microsoft speaker at the podium to address his problem: His company couldn't keep up with the cycle of new revisions. By the time his organization rolled Windows95 out to its users, Office97 and Windows97 would be available, putting him right back where he started. Digesting and vulnerable. What should he do?
The Microsoft speaker, evangelist Marshall Goldberg, advised that IS organizations should simply skip revisions until they need them. Microsoft said that? Well, a Microsoft evangelist said it. It was a stunningly honest answer. The Technology Elephant The computer industry is predicated on the rapid consumption of the next great thing, replacing perfectly good (but old and, thus, somehow inadequate) technology with something purported to be better. Intel, Microsoft, Wall Street and many others have made their fortunes with this business practice. It's feeding your 401(k), too. The press doesn't come off unscathed either; vendors and the press urge each other on. Want Fries With That? Have we forgotten to ask: "Does it help my business to eat the elephant?" After IS eats the pachyderm, it is sluggish until digestion turns meat into energy. Then, it's a predator again. The elephant may be any one of a number of new technologies (in no particular order, by no means all-inclusive and with no venom intended for any of them)--ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, Windows NT, network computers and three-tier intranet applications that have proven to work in day-to-day IS operations. So much for final finishes. The Internet only exacerbates the short software cycle problem, so don't expect that you can avoid the issue. You need to ask often, what value does this new feature bring to my business, and what's the cost of deploying it to my organiza tion? Why is it essential to the organization's operation? How will it help us be more competitive? If IS isn't asking, your president or CEO certainly is. I'll Have the Salad Can you really wait and, say, skip major OS revisions or stall until a cutting-edge technology or product has moved from a single vendor's offering to a true interoperable multivendor solution? If you use technology as a productivity tool, not as a business differentiator, then you probably don't need the first product out of the quality assurance lab. If there's business value in using technology to be there first, then by all means do it. Be a predator. Today's commodity pricing and technology advances quickly bring formerly advanced technologies to commodity status much more rapidly than before. The window of opportunity to make a big hit with a computing-based business solution is smaller, but the opportunity is probably much larger. And you'll have to repeat your hits. There's a herd of elephants on the horizon. Living with less-than-cutting-edge technology may cause you to withstand a few sniggers from the technologically superior, but consider this: Live by the new technologies and you can get burned by them, too. Be the first ones to figure out ATM's complexity or Win95's ha rdware requirements or NT's shortfallings in a large enterprise, and you'll be digesting those technologies for a long time. The organizations that ate smaller prey, added on smaller pieces and digested slowly stayed nimble. Don't dine on the technology feast unless you're hungry, even if the buffet is tantalizing. Patricia Schnaidt can be reached at pschnaidt@nwc.com. |
by Bill Frezz a Corporate View by Brian Walsh In the Middle by Bruce Robertson On The Wire by Bill Alderson and J. Scott Haugahl Updated March 25, 1997 |
