15 April 2017

Don’t follow the hype: build your own use case

You are allowed to say no to a technology, at least for now.

I was never a BlackBerry person. When it swept through the professionals around me, my manager wanted me to have one. He even tried to set up an employee award, just so he could hand me a BlackBerry and call it a prize. I said no thanks and kept my Nokia E71, which I liked a lot.

A while later I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and that one made sense for me. I used it as my laptop, more or less: email, documents, and a remote desktop app to reach my real laptop from wherever I was. The difference was that this time I had a use case of my own.

I think about this whenever someone insists that a company must be on the cloud, or running IoT and big data by next quarter. None of these ideas is new. They existed for years, got renamed, and took off when the conditions were right. Being late is not always a failure, and being early is not always a win.

So before you adopt something, write down your own use case. Not your industry’s. Yours: your firm, your team, your constraints. If it holds up, go. If it does not, wait, and do not let marketing make the decision for you.