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Lou Mazzucchelli
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Lou Mazzucchelli is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council and a Senior Consultant with Cutter's Innovation & Enterprise Agility and Social Networking practices. He is a venture partner at Ridgewood Capital, where he helps manage their technology portfolio. He is also a director of Asure Software. Prior to joining Ridgewood Capital, Lou was an investment banker at Gerard Klauer Mattison, which he joined in 1996 as its PC and digital media technology analyst. He was named to the Wall Street Journal all-star team in 1998 and in 1999 was one of nine “Home-Run Hitters” analysts (out of 2,400) recognized for his stock-picking performance. Previously, Lou spent 13 years leading Cadre Technologies, a pioneering computer-aided software engineering tools company that he founded in 1982 and grew to become one of the top 50 US ISVs before its sale in 1986. During this period, he was listed in the “Top 200 in the Software Industry” by Software Magazine. Lou began his career in data communications, moving to IT management and consulting before founding Cadre. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.
What is the point of the perennial IT survey process?
Tim Lister, Dennis Adams and I recently led a Cutter study to understand which new technologies companies are beginning to embrace. When analyzing the resulting data, Tim and I asked ourselves What is the point of the perennial IT survey process? Well, for some, it is a way to assess IT market prospects for the year. For others, it is a contributor to their benchmarking process, as the results can indicate baseline behavior. For still others, it's a way to surface issues that might be lurking just over the horizon and to provide hints for tuning competitive strategies and tactics.
We set out to construct a set of questions that would yield answers that might be meaningful to those three constituencies. However, our initial reaction to these survey results was that there does not appear to be any huge groundswell toward, or away from, any particular technology -- we see a fairly predictable set of responses.
These results may, of course, be a function of some of the limitations of this type of survey research -- for example, the inherent heterogeneity of the respondents. But, even acknowledging these limitations, there is still significant value in the data we collected. In fact, the very heterogeneity of the respondents can be an asset in pointing to sweeping trends that can impact your own organization.
My and Tim's commentary on these trends was published in a recent issue of Cutter Benchmark Review . Dennis Adams also analyzed the data for that issue. Our take is useful in that it can help you make better decisions in your organization. Thus, as you consider the questions, responses, and our observations, I suggest that you ask yourself the following questions to contextualize the findings:
- For an emerging trend, if my shop is not engaged in that trend, why not? (There may be very good reasons why not -- and a well-articulated answer can both help refine the decision and also defend against criticism.)
- If the majority is ignoring a particular issue that you believe is important, is there a strategic opportunity to leap ahead of your competition by getting a jump on that issue? Or should you challenge your own beliefs and perhaps reconsider the viability of the specific technology or trend?
- If your resources were different, would you respond differently to the questions? This might point out latent problems or misalignments in strategy across your organization. In other words, if you see an emerging trend, the question is: are you in a position to take advantage of it?
"To see far, you need to dive deep..."
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