Changing Our Minds

"The only thing more iritating than someone that changes their mind every 5 minutes is someone that never changes their mind"

Green Light IT has an almost unique problem among ICT service providers - our customers are with us long enough to see us change our minds and our positions on things like new technology and new approaches. As always these changes can lead to questions and concerns.

Firstly let's establish why our position has to change:

The IT industry is awash with new ideas and for the forseeable future likely always will be. And for every new approach/idea/gizmo/program (we are going to use the technical term "thing" for the rest of the article) that succeeds and goes on to establish a place for itself 10 "things" (or more) fail because of:

• Insufficient take up.
• Being all sizzle, no steak.
• Under-estimating the complexity of the problem.
• The cure being worse than the illness.
• Lacking reliability and sound support.
• etc.

So, to put it succintly there really aren't any silver bullets but every now and then a new approach/idea/gizmo/program arrives which is useful and thinking needs to change.

What Green Light IT customers probably don't realise is that by the time we announce a changed position to them we will have looked at the issue from every which way we can.

Here are some of the principles we try to use when looking at new "things":

1. Proven - Have enough people tried it and gotten the results they were expecting?
2. Cost Effective - Does it solve a real problem for less than what the original problem cost?
3. Reliable - Does it create a system that you can expect to work?
4. Longevity - Are the people that make and support the "thing" likely to be here tomorrow?
5. Utility - How well does the "thing" do what it should, and how else might it be applied?
6. Risk - Can the "thing" be tried at reasonably low risk? Is a back out position possible or is it all or nothing?
7. Security - Does the "thing" take a new and potentialy dangerous approach.
8. Unintended Consequences - What are consequences of using the "thing"? Does the customer understand and expect these consequences?
9. Inevitability - Is the "thing" going to become the new standard whether the customer likes it or not?

As you can probably guess by looking at the list of considerations "things" normally need to be around for a little while before you can assess them in the positive - this does tend to mean we don't recommend our customers getting on the bleeding edge. It's not like we aren't interested - we are always staying across new technologies/approaches (just the other day we had a heated debate about using Solid State Drives for a customer's database server), however we don't tend to change our position until we think there is a sound case for believing the new "thing" is better than the old "thing".

The upside to this for customers is that they get solutions that work. They might not be the latest solutions, but they are ones we know can be relied on.