When the Silver Bullet Fails
The Business Horrors of Ineffective IT Investments
In mythology, the silver bullet can be used to kill a werewolf, witch or vampire. It almost never fails. In business, the shiny savior is usually new information technology. Unfortunately, IT’s success rate is much lower. An ineffective IT silver bullet may not cost you your life, but the wasted time, money and potential could greatly damage your company – and your career.
You can certainly understand why business leaders are drawn in by the allure of emerging technologies. ERP, Big Data, 3D printing and AI all promise or promised “quantum leaps” in efficiency, customer experience and market share. Over time, they usually deliver many positive benefits. However, the leap to a new S-curve looks nothing like the promises in the sales proposal. More likely, the experience is akin to plunging down the first hill of a roller coaster. Thrills and chills may follow but the initial results can be terrifying.
Orion has seen far too many companies struggle with sagging S-curves for far too many years. Our earliest examples date back to the 1990s when clients hastily implemented ERP systems to solve the feared Y2K bug. These clients had been promised best-in-class processes. In reality, day-to-day operations took a terrible hit. One Fortune 500 industrial client saw on-time deliveries plummet to 15%. A major American city experienced a 50% surge in overtime. In fact, so many clients reached out to us to repair business processes that we joked we needed to develop a “sap recovery” system. (SAP was by far the most dominant player in the market back then.)
Over the next few weeks, Orion’s team will share lessons learned over our decades of experience. These will help you:
- Get it right the first time
- Recover from IT-driven implementations that are causing your operational S-curve (performance) to sag