Network self-denial

Fiscal conservatism is wise. Technological paralysis is not.

Check the current market surveys, and you’ll see a fairly consistent message: IT executives, in general, and network managers, in particular, are focused on cutting costs. The winds of commerce are blowing in a conservative direction, and our industry—which has experienced plenty of fat years—is hunkering down in the expectation of some lean ones.

Fiscal conservatism is wise in a time of economic uncertainty. And there are plenty of sound money-saving measures that every organization should take to ensure that every dollar spent on communications infrastructure is spent wisely.

But technological paralysis is not a smart short- or long-term strategy. Lest anyone need reminding, businesses don’t exist to save money. They exist to make it. And they make it by innovating, extending their vertical and geographic market penetration, delighting customers and generally outperforming the competition.

None of this can be accomplished by stagnation. As a matter of fact, in a marketplace that continues to be driven by information, process acceleration and communication, there is as strong a case as ever to be made for aggressive investment in network technologies.

DON'T TELL ME… SHOW ME

Let’s take streaming media as an example. To many buyers, streaming media seems like a “nice-to-have” rather than a “gotta-do-now.” At a time when sales is sweating to make 80% of last year’s numbers, it’s easy to ignore such an apparently glitzy technology altogether.

Let’s say you’re selling some kind of industrial equipment, and you get lots of customer questions about replacing a particular subassembly. What would it be worth to your company to have a video clip that customers could watch to see exactly how to do that replacement properly? How much time would it save your customer service representatives? How much happier would your customers be with your company? How much additional repeat business would come to you—rather than to your competitors—because you demonstrated such an advanced sense of online customer service?

I would suggest that these questions are more important than an overly obsessive focus on reducing network costs. That doesn’t mean that every effort shouldn’t be made to keep those costs to a minimum. It’s just that, taken to an extreme, such conservative thinking will lead you to cut meat, in addition to fat. With such a potentially distorted perspective, companies can starve themselves in a sort of technological anorexia. You wind up thinking you’re on a diet, when what you’re really doing is starving yourself to death.

THE RISK OF NOT RISKING

Another insidious concept creeping into IT culture is that of “risk reduction.” Now, I’m all in favor of risk reduction when we’re talking about info-security or business-continuity planning. But when the term starts getting applied overzealously to legitimate IT projects, I have some concerns. Ultimately, in business and in life, the riskiest thing people do is not to take any risks. Aversion to risk is pathology, not virtue.

There are a couple of ideas that network managers can use to insulate themselves from the groupthink that masquerades as cost-cutting, but can more accurately be termed opportunity-slashing. First, we need to remember back when “nobody got fired for buying IBM.” It’s true that nobody got fired for buying IBM, but plenty of companies permanently forfeited their competitive position by failing to capitalize on the LAN and PC revolutions. So, they didn’t get fired for buying IBM; they just got laid off.

Second, many people strike me as being a bit too hysterical about the challenges of today’s economy. Inside the tech industry, we seem to be a bit upset that Silicon Valley is not making paper millionaires out of newly post-pubescent caffeine addicts. We can also focus a bit too obsessively on Wall Street—which, for everyone’s information, has never and will never reflect that actual earning power of American citizenry. A quick look around will reveal that people are driving better and newer cars than ever before, that foreclosure rates continue to drop, and there is a ton of global cash just waiting for the “Go!” signal from the market’s unseen hand.

Don’t fall prey to management constipation passing itself off as economic prudence. This is the time to assume leadership, not abdicate it. Do it on the cheap, certainly—but do it nonetheless.

Liebmann is an independent consultant specializing in the application of networking technologies to strategic business challenges. Send comments for publication to liebmann@comnews.com.