I had the good fortune to see the late Admiral Grace Hopper speak about the history and direction of information technology, twice. She was a pioneer, having been involved in the creation of COBOL, one of the early third generation languages that sparked an explosion of business applications. To paraphrase her message: The most dangerous words in the world are "we've never done it that way before."

So what have you been doing the same way for years? How about all those IT services you've been running - networks, email, helpdesk,... No doubt, you'll keep running those because the company always ran those once it became established.

But why? Let's reflect on three stories about repeating earlier technical choices because "that's the way we've always done it before". The first may have been stretched for entertainment value, but by the time we get to the last, we'll have hit close to home.

The Space Shuttle's Boosters

This story has been widely circulated and appears word-for-word in at least two sites I've visited, one of which is the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum. A condensed version is on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation site.

The attention-grabbing question is something like "How is the Space Shuttle booster rocket's design related to a horse's bum?"

The shuttle designers wanted to award the booster rocket contract to Morton Thiokol in Utah, and presumably, the company was not about to move. Getting the boosters to Cape Canaveral required building them in sections and shipping them by train. The diameter of the boosters had to be smaller than the train tunnels, which of course were designed around the gauge of the track - 4' 8 1/2".

So, to keep this short, let's look at the sequence of design choices that were made "the way we did it before", starting about 2000 years ago. The Romans, as this story goes, used chariots with wheels 4' 8 1/2" apart, designed around the width of the two horses up front. The Romans eventually occupied England in strength, and chariot traffic rutted the paths that become the roads. Cart makers thereafter designed carts with wheels spaced to fit the ruts to avoid axle breakage.

When the coal mines needed carts on rails, the same cart makers designed them to the same size; after all, they already had the tooling, such as it was back then. Railroads came next, and as you would expect, standard railroad gauge followed suit from rail carts. Booster sections ride the rails, so there you have it.

A bit far-fetched, and probably not true, but illustrative. Closer at hand, however...

QWERTY and Dvorak

How did the keyboards of today's computers, Blackberries, and, apparently, children's toy smartphones come to have the silly layouts they have? Dr. August Dvorak patented a different layout in 1936 that claimed to allow typists to reach much faster typing speeds. (The record for typing is 212 words per minute, and the typist used a Dvorak key layout.) Why isn't everyone using that? Again, some history...

For those who never used one, a typewriter is a completely mechanical device that has metal letters mounted on levers arranged in something of a fan-shaped layout. Each lever is pulled by pressing its key. The metal letter hits an inked ribbon, behind which is the paper on which you are typing. If you type too fast, you'll jam the typewriter as all the letters come together too quickly.

The QWERTY keyboard was not the first typewriter keyboard design. The keys were later arranged this way, in part to separate letters that were likely to be struck sequentially, and in part to slow the typist down. This 1870's design became the standard.

Eventually, electric typewriters like the Smith-Corona daisy-wheel or the IBM Selectric (with the ball head) made jamming a thing of the past. There was no technical reason to stay with QWERTY. But once all those typists knew QWERTY, they were unlikely to switch.

And early word processors had to be designed for the then-current user community, and the tradition continued.

Most computer and OS manufacturers provide for Dvorak keyboards, but how may people use them? I don't know any. I suspect QWERTY keyboards will become obsolete only when we speak to or conduct telepathy with our devices.

Server Refresh

A small enterprise I'm aware of had an 8 year old server that was on its last legs. Given the bloat in the old applications, the need for additional applications, and the increasing volume of email and file storage, it was time to upgrade.

When it's time to upgrade everything, it's time to rethink everything.

They could have outsourced email. (I pay $3 per month for 1GB of email).

They could have subscribed to software-as-a-service (SaaS) for some of their applications; financial and staff management applications are readily available.

And if none of those suited them, they could have investigated cloud computing. It isn't yet mainstream, but it's cheap, and it's the wave of the future. And all of that would lay the groundwork for replacing fat-client desktops (as they wear out) with cheap thin client machines that, by the way, use less power.

Instead, they chose to do what they did before. They spent 5-digit sums of money for two new servers, and they'll have to pay vendors to maintain the servers and the software for years to come. They've missed an opportunity to save some hard cash, which right now is hard to come by and will be for years.

Technology Commodities and the Future

So much of technology has become a commodity. Email, even Exchange. CRM. QuickBooks Online. Helpdesk services (good for Tier 1 support). Total support (including deskside) if bought in large enough numbers. Overseas development, not quite up to the hype, but useful if managed right. Team collaboration sites like Microsoft Live. Content management based websites that put you in control, or blogging sites like WordPress that some are using to make whole websites. Robert Cringely recently made a presentation at the Boston Chapter of the Society for Information Management, and, to make the point about the consumerization of technology, he talked about Internet startups that require a capital investment of zero, made possible by all the services readily available on the Internet.

If you're running an IT department, doing things the way you always did it before sets you up in competition with those who can do it better, cheaper, and faster because it's their core business. Sooner or later your CEO will hear about this from his or her peers, and you'll have some explaining to do.

And if you're a CEO, ask yourself: Why would you want to make large capital investments and large labor cost commitments to services that bring no revenue and that can be bought as commodities on the open market?

Bottom Line

What's your company's core business? What could you do with technology to contribute to your core business? What technology could make your core business world-class? What would you do with technology that would allow you to blow the doors off the competition?

That's what you should be doing with your IT. That's what you should be doing now while your competition is trying to dig its way out of the recession. That's the future.

And you can't do that by doing things the way you always did them before.