“We paid for it, therefore now it must pay off.”
This mentality is common in trucking businesses with respect to IT. In fact, it’s common in all businesses. In fact, I also suffer from it. It goes like this: you need some automation, you choose one of the options, you implement it, then it sucks. But you don’t want to rip it off and you insist in using it, which might be detrimental to your business.
That the mentality is wrong is pretty much obvious, as is the reason for its existence. Why is it wrong? Because if ripping off your IT system is going to have a return on investment, then you should be ripping it off. Maybe you’ve had it for 10 years and it has paid for itself a thousand times; or maybe you installed it last week and it cost a million. It doesn’t matter. If ripping it off is going to have a return on investment, it’s time to rip it off. The past is irrelevant.
Why do we have this mentality? Because if we spend a million to install something and then we say “it was a bad idea, let’s throw it away”, we look stupid. It hurts our self-esteem.
How do we get rid of this mentality? Several ways:
- We need to approach IT as if it’s an experiment, because that’s what it is.
- We need to understand that in the fast-changing world of IT-for-logistics, we will continue to experiment in eternity if we want to continue having a thriving business.
- We shouldn’t say “it was a bad idea, let’s throw it away”. We should say “it did its job, which was to teach us something and shed some light in the way ahead”.