One of my blog's visitors asked me some questions about technology accelerators as described in Good to Great, and she said it would be ok if I posted the response here as well.

If technology cannot make or break a company's level of greatness, but only serves as an accelerator of greatness or demise already in progress, then why did everyone fall in love with technology for technology's sake during the 1990s?

There are three main reasons in my opinion, and some companies might have more than one of them.

First is that doing anything on the Internet in the 1990s could get you a lot of investment capital. Sometimes millions of dollars were invested into companies that had nothing more than an idea that focused on the Internet. So a lot of companies tried to reinvent themselves by using the Internet to change their business model. Walgreen's was an excellent example of a company doing things right with the Internet in "Good to Great". They knew it was an opportunity, but they took their time to decide how they would adopt the new technology.

Second is a bit of fear from being beaten by the competition. Nick Carr's article "IT Doesn't Matter" talks a bit about how in many ways IT should be implemented ito limit risk rather than move into new territories. In the 1990s, a lot of companies rushed into the Internet realm. Their competitors worried about giving away potential competitive advantage and so they too searched for how they could use the Internet to avoid being left behind. Many of them did this without really thinking through how the technology would impact their organization.

Third was the innovative atmosphere surrounding the Internet. It was a brand new marketplace, and companies wanted to take advantage to reach new and existing customers in a new way. Rather than think about the process though, they just went with the first idea that seemed to make sense. Toys'R'Us first attempt at e-commerce was a good example of this. They rushed into the Internet arena without understanding the impact it would have on the rest of their business. They ended up having to redo a lot of work to make things right.

Why is there so much hype and fear about new technologies, and what can you do to view new technologies with objective equanimity?

The hype or fear that a person feels probably comes from where they are on the scale of technology innovator vs. technology laggard. Just like a person has a first impression of another person, each person is going to have their own reaction to a new technology. As someone working in IT, I think you have to ask some difficult questions to be sure you have a real understanding of a technology's impact before deciding to adopt it. Some of the first ones are these:

1) What benefits will the technology provide to users?
2) What changes will the technology require users to make?
3) Have users been asking for a solution to the problem that this technology addresses?
4) How does this technology affect business processes?
5) How does this technology affect the supply chain from suppliers to customers?
6) What is the cost (both actual and in terms of time) to implement the technology?
7) How long will it take to get a real benefit from adopting the technology?

If you have answers to these questions that are thought out well, then you can give the technology a real objective analysis. If any of the answers to these questions are really short, that could be good or bad. The thing to remember is to keep the organization, its people, and its customers in mind when analyzing a new technology.