If you look at history, there are many organizations and technologies, which got decimated due to stagnancy and lack of innovation. The same applies to teams and groups within a company. Let me start with a story from my time in San Francisco – which now seems like decades ago. At one of my previous organizations in the Bay Area, we had developed a software to index product data so that it can be searched in a much better way. But since it was not automated, it was not a very efficient process. We had to manually intervene before midnight each day, to ensure that the data is being indexed correctly. While that piece of software served us well for many years, it also ruined my sleep on most nights. Whenever there was a process failure, I would promptly receive a call from the Network Operations Center (NOC) in the middle of the night. I remember I had set a different ringtone on my phone for the NOC, and I dreaded it whenever I would be woken up by that tone. So much so that I vouched never to use that ringtone ever again! The point is that this software was our baby. We did everything in our power to make improvements to it and sustain it for as long as we could. Then one fine day, a startup emerged on the scene, and brought with them a fully automated way to do what we were doing. But we had the good sense to acquire them. The infusion of fresh blood into the team helped us modernize our systems and regain lost ground. But the biggest learning for us from this incident, was that we were too emotionally invested in our product. This prevented us from thinking out-of-the-box, despite the fact that we had the requisite skills within the team. Read the full article here.
This article written by Sanjeeb Patel, appeared in ET CIO.