Technology Paradise Lost: Why Companies Will Spend Less to Get More from Information Technology

To provide a good sense of this insightful book’s message, we’ve provided an excerpt from the Preface:

“Evaluating big IT projects and trends has consumed a large part of my professional life. After graduating from engineering school in 1979, I spent nearly a decade as a technical journalist, reporting on technologies ranging from robots that painted automobiles, to voice-recognition systems that took orders over the phone, to software that controlled and managed the brewing of beer. I toured hundreds of facilities in the United States and learned firsthand how companies used technology. When the technology was used well, the results were amazing. There was always a risk of failure, however, when companies jumped into a technology too quickly.

I then became a technology analyst and spent over a decade at Gartner Inc., starting when it was shy of $40 million per year in revenues and leaving when revenues had grown above $600 million. During that time, I became a trusted advisor to both sellers and buyers of complex technologies, particularly in the area of back-office and operations software. I worked with many of the Fortune 500 companies around the world as well as some of the largest software providers, including SAP, Oracle, Computer Associates, and IBM. …
By the end of my tenure at Gartner, in the late 1990s, I was spending more time helping clients clean up problems than launch new technology initiatives.

In the next stretch of my career, as a consultant, I started to look with fresh eyes at what it takes to be successful with technology. Over the next few years, I found more questions than answers. Back in the 1990s, it appeared that an irrational exuberance for IT based capital spending grabbed hold of corporate America – and didn’t let go for a long time. … When the exuberance finally died down in 2001, corporate technology buying was left in a state of exhaustion and malaise, with little future direction. A new way of thinking and implementing IT was long overdue.

….. A change was in the air for corporate buyers and sellers of technology, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Unlike during the previous 15 years, there was no Big Thing. No Y2K. No ERP. No Internet mania to stoke the hype fires. Instead, many small things were happening: major companies were experimenting with offshore development; clients were choosing to build open-source software solutions for under $100,000 rather than buying $2 million software packages; CIOs were looking to cut back rather than accelerate spending. Everyone was waiting for the Next Big Thing—but what was it? …

A lot of books and reports focusing on business improvement via technology have a catch: Before you can hope to see any benefits, you are required to spend more money on a new technology than what you initially paid. While I have favorite technologies that I believe can improve business processes, those technologies are not the subject of this book. This book is about increasing the effectiveness of technology while reducing IT expenses. Instead of a silverbullet technology, companies need silver-haired thinking, grounded in solid returns, not airy promises.

Let me be blunt: The 1990s way of doing business is dead. Buyers and sellers of technology have two choices: Deny the practice of spending less and getting more, and be rolled over by change—or embrace the change and move forward into a new business environment. If I am right and we are living through an IT inflection point, it is useful to know that such points occurred in all major technological revolutions dating back to the industrial revolution of the 18th century…

These inflection points have one consistent feature: The companies that recognize the nature of change before everyone else prosper greatly. The goal of this book is to help anyone whose livelihood depends on the IT industry to navigate the difficult times ahead.“