How far behind the bleeding edge is the right place for my business?

In IT we talk about the ‘bleeding edge' of technology as being the very forefront of technological development. It is called the bleeding edge because of the very high risk associated with being an early adopter of new technology. When we adopt a technology that does not take off we can lose a lot of time, money or both.

For some technology companies it is essential to work at the bleeding edge to find and exploit opportunities that technology developments present.

For many investors who recall the dotcom bubble bursting and many of my colleagues who lost jobs or lost personal fortunes on start-up ideas, this bleeding edge is no fun at all.

For many of us in business, investing in bleeding edge technology is a risk we can not afford to be involved in. If we are after stable systems for our core business functions, the bleeding edge is not likely to be the place to invest.

So how do we know what is the right technology and when is it mature?

This is a very difficult question to answer as some systems we think should be mature and stable just are not as good as they should be. I think we can safely put Windows Vista into this category as the business world has labelled it a dud. Windows 7 is about to be released and is getting great reviews, but unless there is a compelling reason to leap into it, it is worth leaving to the geeks for awhile.

My staff will be onto it as soon as it is released - some are already running pre-release versions as they should. But not on production systems.

The same goes for the new search engine out from Microsoft that I have commented on this week. Yep, we should all try using it and see if Bing represents improved functionality for planning holidays or solving problems with its unique decision engine. This is a low-cost, low-risk use of the new technology, but we should not radically modify our web pages to be optimised for it just yet.

So part of the job of a technical advisor in any business needs to be to get to know the business drivers and know when is the right time to introduce technology.

While it can be great fun learning the functionality of a new tool, it needs to be considered as an investment. You do not want to be the test pilot for every new product on the market unless your business is in the innovation space. Even then you need to be selective and get real results from your investment.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.