IBM is having another heart attack, HP is falling apart, and those crashing share prices are a dose of reality to those buy innovative companies and process them into a business unit shops. Now the bad ideas are getting shed and creative destruction continues in the marketplace. This darwinism is accelerated in software and technology because anybody with a computer can potentially wreck your business tomorrow morning. Your software becomes obsolete, your product antiquated, and your board members suddenly start a share buyback programme to support their stock options.
Much like cancer, this process grows and grows until someone takes a blowtorch to a whole business unit in an effort to cauterize the wounds. But those efforts are just the trashing of a drowning man as he gives life one last kick.
The stakes in high-tech are very much winner takes all, and being part of a company getting sliced and diced is in your future if you fail to stay alive to the reality of the shifting technological sands. You will drown in the rising tide as you cling to your Nokia Windows mobile trying to Skype someone for help.
So, how do you put into place a system that keeps you in touch with all these changes and incorporate them into your business?
Early Technology Adoption
Everybody knows the adoption curve chart, and it does a good job of giving you the general idea. I have been in meetings where I have heard "We don't want to be early adopters", and yet everyone on that team needed a new solution but sticking to the tired and frustrated option was preferable to rocking the boat. Many people wear the late adopter title as a badge of honour, and sure, it was smart in the case of the Titanic, but if you are forever afraid to take risks then you'll never reap the rewards.
To overcome the inertia that sets in when companies grow beyond a certain size requires strategic thinking that embraces the bold. Creating a programme that brings new technologies into play and applies them to critical projects is the only way to keep both your organization up to date, and to truly gauge the effectiveness of the new technology. You can read white papers until your eyes bleed, but they won't ever cover the nitty-gritty details you encounter when trying to ship a feature under a tight deadline.
The risk is that your organization chooses the wrong tool and fluffs a release, but the reward may be that you get the jump on your rivals and ship three new features instead of one. Additionally you will get an upskilled workforce ready to blow the competition out of the water in the next cycle.
The main problem in Enterprise though is that security concerns around working with new technologies are a whole raison d'etre for some departments. The Business Intelligence or Tools department have to thoroughly vet products before they can be used in-house, and they in turn must go to 47 finance meetings and fill our 22 acquisition forms to justify the trial licence. This is a bottle neck that hinders getting new technology in the door before it can ever be evaluated. I wonder do these companies apply the same stringent criteria to stock buy back schemes?
Bring Your Own Device Is Becoming Bring Your Own Technology
The flip side is that if you don't hurry up, people won't wait. They fire ahead and decide to take the backlash if it comes. Better to do it now and ask forgiveness later than sit around and be told no. They seek out the solutions needed and start abandoning all those tools you pay big bucks for in favour of their preferred option. This sets you up for a head on clash between early adopters in your organization and the laggards holding on to Internet Explorer and still looking for Flash websites. In a winner takes all market you need to back the early adopters and mitigate the risk with clear thinking and careful application of the new tools.
Calling The Right Tools Drives Down Costs
Older technology, particularly "Enterprise Grade" technology, usually comes with a bewildering list of annual licence fees, service charges, support contracts, vendor lock-in clauses, and 'suspicious' backward compatibility issues. These really rack up the costs, and drive the TCO and ROI metrics in the wrong direction. Therefore, depending on how you manage the development portfolio, these will either end up being sunk costs that will require a massive overhaul to undo, or if your portfolio is managed correctly then they really can become the I in ROI.
The responsibility is yours and the tools that you invest in need to be properly put through the hoops in-house before you commit to the latest and greatest.
Conclusion
Not all technology is ready to go in at enterprise level, and there are various degrees to which some is suitable and some is not. But the innovations that come along that are aimed at Enterprise, that thread the needle between security, productivity, and innovation are the ones that will leave you behind. The advantages that your competitor will get by making the right call will leave you choking on their Range Rover Sport exhaust fumes. Those are the blindsided hits that leave your development teams stuck in slow motion, the marketing team skipping release numbers to look more active, and that hand your executives gardening leave.
The challenge is to learn how to adopt the latest and greatest, take the training, upskill your organization, or maybe sell your shares now and safely watch it all unravel from a distance.
In the spirit of always handing out inside information, here is some Enterprise ready software you should start evaluating before the stampede. As with all inside information, those who trade on it successfully make it big!