It is my opinion – and experience as well – that new technology CAN open up for new opportunities for businesses. But the technology will never do so by itself – expectations and risks must be managed strictly.

All technologies mature over time. Remember that this is the result of someone that “moves first” and get the experience and the advantages first as well. There is no factual proof that states that these experiences – in GENERAL – are more expensive than the advantages thay may give.

That said – first movers on new technology – can absolutely end up in very unfortunate situations and end up paying far to high prices to maintain a reasonable business case.

Since SharePoint is mentioned as an example in this post – and since this is an area where I spend a lot of time cleaning up messy projects and implementations – let me explain my view on why so many companies have been experiencing the difficulties thay have.

With SharePoint being a faily complex platform, it is my experience that a large percentage of companies have not had a solid understanding of the technology before implementing it. Martin White has an excellent post about this very issue (http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog/entry.php?entry=50). In this post Martin White explains the need for structured governance in SharePoint project – especially in larger organizations.

With SharePoint the need for governance is the single largest factor to why organization are facing issues. This is really due to the fact that many organizations have not spend the time to investigate and plan their SharePoint implementations before hitting the “setup-button”. Guides, best practices and information have been available from the beginning (With SharePoint a large number of companies participated in early deployment programs, where Microsoft invested heavily in learning real life experiences from real life projects) but for some reason most companies dont use this information.

So what should we do then? Well – one solution is to wait for everyone else to move first and then hope that they are willing to share experiences. Another approach is to find people that can help you manage and plan your project. Yes this has a price – but I would argue anytime that the businesscase in being “first to market” a new service or product (which should be the reason to why you would implement a new technology in the first place) will often be very interesting.

Examples; How Danfoss used the SmartWorker approach (a business-value driven proces to evaluating and implementing new software tool for knowledge workers) to implementing technologies like Outlook and SharePoint: http://www.franklincovey.dk/home.asp?ContentID=235

First, thanks for writing good blogposts!

Right now I’m actually listining to music from my iPod, which is a great example.
Apple launched the iPod and created a whole market, gaining supreme first mover advantages.

The point should not be that we are all to follow companies like Apple. The point is to keep in mind that a golden direction does not exist. Chose a strategy that makes sence in your segment.

Bo.

Thanks for commenting.

Could you provide an example of real value a new system could bring?

I can’t really imagine a new feature or new version contributing any significant competitive advantage

Cheers, Janus

When choosing a risky first-mover advantage, you might end up giving yourself a disadvantage, as you point out. On the other hand – you might choose a direction that brings so much value, that the potential advantage outweighs the disadvantage.
There’s always a tradeoff of sorts.