What causes a business to abandon hardware, software, or tools it once relied on? Enumerating the common reasons helps you recognize when it’s time to move on.
Once upon a time, your company ran Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on Novell servers, wrote its custom applications in Turbo Pascal and Visual Basic, and used Nortel or Cascade Communications to connect to the nascent Internet, which you still unapologetically described as the Information Superhighway.
Don’t snort in derision. Your business relied on those tools and technologies because they worked. Users knew the product’s features. IT support understood its configuration foibles. The budget was predictable, and those vendors were trustworthy, safe choices.
But life moves on. Despite company and user loyalty, at some point, someone chose to replace that software, hardware, or infrastructure with something else. What made the business stop using them?
This isn’t an idle #GetOffMyLawn contemplation. Change management is a regular concern for CIOs, IT managers, and the CFOs who glower at them. The best way to determine, “Is it time to abandon this known supplier?” is to contemplate why enterprise organizations left behind the established brands of their past.
Companies usually hold onto existing hardware, software, computing environments, programming languages, databases, or whatever, let’s call it the Turbo Encabulator, for as long as possible. This is supported by file formats, established workflows, supplier contracts, and other elements that contribute to corporate inertia and technical debt.
Eventually, a “final straw” tips the balance, and the organization commits to a transition. “That does it!” they say. “It’s time to switch.”
Here’s how I categorize those final straws, which may operate singly or as part of a hay bale.
There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says, “This is new, and therefore better.”
Dean Inge
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