We look at technology as a way to create leverage in our business. Collectively our culture worships technology, bestowing on it the ability to fix everything, do everything, save us money, make us money, and anything else that can find its way onto the never-ending feature list. I am reluctant to join in the worship of technology, not because I’m not enthralled by what it can do but because I’ve been involved in too many technology projects that failed to deliver one-tenth of the potential and promise. Yes, a lot of this has to do with the tendency to actually believe the exaggerated and miss-guided technology sales pitch, but most of it is due to the lack of understanding of what it takes to actually make technology truly create leverage in your business.

The purchase of the technology creates no leverage. It is immediately sunk cost and if you bought a piece of commercial technology it isn’t a differentiator because your competitors can buy the same thing. Making the investment is a requirement to create leverage but it isn’t the actual thing that makes the leverage happen. Lots of technology has been purchased without providing any business leverage at all (we’re all too aware of this fact).

I ran across this quote recently and I think this is a much better way to think about technology tools, software in particular (e.g. web-to-print, Print MIS).