IT purchasing and “sacred cow syndrome”
I mention Dell laptops being used trackside in Formula 1 below, which wasn’t an idle aside. For many years, a huge fleet of creaky midrange machines was used by pit crews and management alike – and all covered under the PC giant’s on-site maintenance plan. When one went wrong, a local engineer would jump in his van and battle through the pre-race traffic to fix the unit on the spot.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, perhaps, until some sceptical loudmouth comes along and asks why they’re paying for comprehensive worldwide hardware support, rather than buying role-appropriate laptops that are designed to keep on working even when left out all day on a metal rail in a tropical climate.
Of course in the case of F1, there’s enough money sloshing around that it’s a non-issue. But I have a strong suspicion that the practice began back in the days when there simply was no laptop capable of reliably withstanding the rigours of the racing lifestyle and from then on became entrenched as the way things were done, with no one taking the initiative to research whether a better solution might have emerged.
If you’re serious about making smart IT investments, that’s often achieved by questioning and challenging past practice, rather than institutionalising it (which I call “sacred cow syndrome”). The difficulty is that no one wants to own up to having made or gone along with bad decisions. I know of one law firm that allowed a million-pound photocopier contract to roll on for several years, more or less because no one wanted to admit that their networked printers did a better, cheaper and more reliable job.
Overturning assumptions and long-established roadmaps takes a lot of engagement, and messenger-shooting is sadly a common proof that you have stumbled upon a sacred cow mechanism. Nonetheless, that’s where real savings and benefits can be found: try not to think just in terms of upgrading an existing system, but consider whether newer technology might offer new ways to get closer to your business objective.