Follow, Don't Lead

Computerworld - One powerful way to reduce costs without forgoing new systems is simply to spend more slowly. The rapid, ongoing fall in IT prices means that even small delays in purchases can dramatically reduce the cost of achieving a given level of IT functionality. And delaying IT investments can have other beneficial effects as well. Companies that stay off the leading edge reduce their chance of being saddled with buggy or soon-to-be-obsolete technology. They are also able to learn from the successes and mistakes of early movers, enabling them not only to avoid unnecessary costs but, often, to build better systems as well.
As late as February 2001, Cisco CEO John Chambers was telling an audience of corporate IT managers that executives "need to think about technology changes as waves. The leaders will always be one or two waves ahead in applications or services and the laggards one or two waves behind." At the same event, a senior partner at the consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers was even more emphatic, telling companies that "the game is changing and they need to make abrupt and accurate changes or they will lose; and they will lose big. ... [T]here is no fast-follower strategy."
Such rhetoric made for good marketing, but it was largely hollow. Except in rare cases, both the hope of achieving a defensible advantage through IT spending and the fear of obsolescence from failing to invest turned out to be unwarranted. It has become increasingly clear that many of the smartest users of technology stay well back from the cutting edge, waiting to make their purchases until standards and best practices solidify and prices fall. They let their more impatient competitors shoulder the high costs of experimentation, and then they sweep past them, spending less and getting more.
Look at the package delivery business. FedEx has received widespread, and well deserved, acclaim for its efforts at pioneering new IT applications, such as online package tracking. Less appreciated has been the more deliberate approach taken by its archrival, UPS . In fact, UPS was often attacked through the 1980s and 1990s for being a technological slowpoke. All the while, though, UPS was carefully following in FedEx's tracks, learning not just how to copy its rival's systems but often how to make them better and cheaper. When UPS rolled out its own logistics management software, for instance, it went with a more open system than FedEx's, making it easier for customers to incorporate UPS's technology into their existing systems.
Far from hampering UPS, the slow, copycat