Last month, I took my family to Orlando, Florida for a week-long vacation.  This was the first visit to the Orlando area for my three kids, so we dug deep into our wallets and bought tickets for both Magic Kingdom and Epcot.  The last time I went to Epcot was in the early-mid 1990’s when I was in Orlando for the annual Powersoft Users Conference.  As an aside, PowerBuilder was pretty popular in its heyday.  I remember the rush I felt when I built my first PowerBuilder 3.0 application that leveraged the DataWindow control.  I liked PowerBuilder so much, I left a big IT consulting firm and started doing consulting work for a company called Janiff Software.  Janiff developed a third-party PowerBuilder framework called APOL (Advanced PowerBuilder Object Library).  APOL was ahead of its time.  Unfortunately for Janiff, Powersoft released its own development framework, the PowerBuilder Foundation Classes (PFC), and interest in APOL waned.  If you know what Herb Lester, one of the two founders of Janiff Software, is up to now, please drop me a line.  Anyway, back to present-day Disney…

While some of the rides, attractions and exhibits at Magic Kingdom and Epcot seem a bit outdated, it’s still a magical place to spend a few days (and $$$) with the family.  I was most impressed with two things at Disney.  First, Disney does a remarkable job training all of its employees, oops, I mean cast members, on how to provide high-quality customer service.  Every single cast member we dealt with, from restaurant wait staff to ice cream cart attendants to groundskeepers were extremely knowledgeable and very eager to help.  Impressive.  The second thing that impressed me was Disney’s FASTPASS system.  For those in the minority who haven’t visited Disney in the past few years, Disney’s FASTPASS is an automated ticketing/reservation system, introduced in 1999, that allows visitors to avoid long lines at certain rides and attractions.  The “user interface” for the FASTPASS system couldn’t be simpler.  There are FASTPASS machines next to the most popular rides (strangely, not all rides provide a FASTPASS) in the theme park.  You feed your park pass into the FASTPASS machine and it spits out a reservation ticket.  The reservation ticket gives you a window of time that you have to come back to the attraction.  Give the reservation ticket to the attendant and you avoid the main queue and wait in the much shorter, FASTPASS line.  There are a few rules with the FASTPASS system.  I won’t describe them here.  If you’re interested, check out this Wikipedia article about Disney’s FASTPASS.

So, what does the FASTPASS system have to do with IT consulting?  Well, Disney and its FASTPASS system is a terrific example of an organization using a non-bleeding edge technology to improve customer service and utlimately, deliver better bottom line results.  Those of us who work in the IT fields are often mesmorized by the latest [whiz-bang technology] and are too eager to throw out [older technology] (that still works and may also be more cost-effective).  In true Mad Libs style, you can replace [whiz-bang technology] and [older technology] with:

• Vista [whiz-bang] / Windows XP [older]
• Office 2007 [whiz-bang] / Office 2003 [older]
• Web 2.0 and AJAX [whiz-bang] / plain HTML web sites [older]

I’m not saying that the latest-and-greatest technology doesn’t have its place.  On the contrary, in certain situations adapting leading-edge technology is critical to an organization’s success.  There are benefits to being an early adpator or first-mover.  However, for the vast majority of organizations, using slightly older technology will not leave you or your organization at a competitive disadvantage.  It’s how well you apply the technology and how well your employees, customers and partners are embraced and included in the application of the technology that is more important than the technology itself.