Quick note: FOMO vs. legacy tech

This short post is based on the discussions I keep having with technology leaders about their tech stack, vendors’ overzealous sales teams, and investment decisions. It is also inspired by the discussions I’ve had with Simon Wardley.

We get bombarded with new approaches, technologies, platforms, and software products. Often, when something new comes out, it’s promoted as the thing. Unless you buy this now, you’re left behind and all your competitors will be laughing at you. A familiar situation, I imagine.

When a new approach is ‘discovered’ (think: containers, or DevOps) and you become aware of it, you won’t know whether you should pay close attention to it — will it go mainstream? Will you be left behind if you don’t adopt it? Is this the right thing to focus on, over everything else?

The question of whether you should pay more attention to new technology is at least two-fold: does it make sense, and does it make sense for you.

When you’re too late to the party

Successful (as in useful and popular) new technology is rarely completely novel. Often, it is a meaningful enhancement of what’s already there, either by making things easier to use or improving the ‘packaging’. There are, of course, also instances of serendipitous discovery and exaptation.

Chances are, that when you hear about new technology, that next best thing after sliced bread, it’s already in the mainstream. Organizations who were able to make most of this, in terms of competitive advantage, have already left you in the dust. This is the crowd in the bright yellow triangle above.

Chances are, that when you hear about new technology, you are experiencing the ‘Silver Bullet’ stage — when something is sold as the ointment for all ills. If you’ve been in the business for long enough then you have seen claims like this before, too. This is also the time for you to make up your mind about whether to invest in this or not — keeping in mind that whatever the solution, it will not be a cure-all, and it will require hard work.

The ‘insignificant’ new development.

You might decide to ignore this new thing — the impact on what you currently do feels insignificant, touching only a small corner of your work and the existing environment, and it might be a fad anyway, so you can just wait and see. Maybe it will all be blue again tomorrow, even if a slightly different shade, or there will be something new and green instead of orange, or perhaps thinking about it can be postponed until that major programme you’re working on right now is finished. Planned for two, padded for three, probably failing in four.

When you stood in the lobby for the whole time

The trouble with this is that you are probably seeing only a small section of the big picture.

The evolution of new technology: already available long before you became aware of it, currently feeling like an insignificant development, and ready to have a major impact on your business going forward.

If you’ve been unaware of the new technology while it was in ‘stealth’ mode, then the questions you need to answer are very different from what they could have been — and the decisions you have to make are different, too.

In the green ‘Shared Utilization’ zone, there is no more (significant) competitive advantage for you to adopt the new technology. You have to choose whether to do what everybody else is doing, or wait for the next wave of new technology — because make no mistake here, the above is a repetitive pattern, sometimes with a frequency of only a few years before occurrences.

One of the riskiest things you could do while in the green zone is to make a massive investment in the technology in question. Not because it won’t bring you benefits — it most likely will — but because you’re already on your way to the legacy zone. By the time you’re finished with this massive program, you’re stuck. Another or several other highly promising new technologies have emerged since you made your commitment, and you’ve jumped from one ‘painful legacy’ situation to another. You’ve successfully addressed the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) challenge but created another problem for your organization.

Just to be clear — there might be significant benefits for your organization from anything that sits in that red zone, but it also has an impact on what else you could do and achieve. It brings its own ways of working, its beliefs, its processes and procedures, its particular ways of collaboration. Unless these have been health-checked through the journey and improved as required — something that in my experience rarely happens — they start paralyzing everything around them. Not because they’re bad by nature, but because they require more and more effort to maintain, and that effort will come at the expense of something else. Depending on your organization, you might be OK to keep it as-is for ten more years, or you might have to address it pretty much tomorrow. But, for anyone in doubt — this is not me endorsing Bimodal IT. No.

When the fortune-teller has already left

Unless you do have a crystal ball and unlimited funds, you need to be pretty smart about what to invest in.

Here’s a few pointers:

1. Pay attention! Rather than panicking or getting over-excited every time you hear about something new, pay attention to what’s happening on the market. Keep your eyes and ears open to weak signals. Use mapping.
2. Do your own research! Don’t rely on others to look out for you — even if they genuinely care and want to help, they have many filters you might not benefit from. Make up your own mind about market developments. Don’t expect corporate subscription based Generic Thought Leadership as a Service companies to guide you in the Novelty Advantage zone.
3. Be curious! Yes, that new thing might turn out to be a fad. Yes, that new service provider might go bankrupt next year. But — in their place, something new will come. Something that builds on the lessons learned from those failures. Something that might look almost the same, but is better. When you dismiss something, do this based on data, not opinions.
4. Stop wasting! Do not run after every new technology, tool, or method and try to ‘implement’ it ASAP. Make sure it fits with what your organization wants to achieve. Make sure it fits with what your organization can achieve. Make sure the success criteria are based on business outcomes, not (purely) on technical achievements.
5. Don’t get attached! That new technology, that new software, that new method or framework you’re so excited about — it’s just scaffolding. It is never an ideal solution, but it can be very useful. At one point, you will have to replace it. If you’ve allowed it to become someone’s pet or everybody’s favourite deity, then you’re in trouble.
6. Be realistic! Stop daydreaming. Don’t create detailed fancy-looking five-year plans. Understand what your direction is — based on organizational priorities that are based on your customer needs. Once you’ve figured out the direction, evaluate what the sustainable speed of change can be. Don’t focus only on the North Star — look for the adjacent possible.
7. Never stop! Try to avoid digging a deep ditch between ‘work’ and ‘improvements’. Your improvement work needs to be running at all times. When you get complacent, or when you ignore the technical debt you’ve created for too long, you will fall off the cliff.
8. Bonus: if you ignore all of the above, make sure you’ve at least kept your CV up to date.