Technology is changing at an exponential rate. Every day we welcome a new technology that claims to change the world. Solve day to day problems in an amazing way. We all feel tempted to use these, and sometimes end up in unexpected situations. Here I sum up few things I consider before using anything new.

It’s not mature

When it comes to new innovating technologies which challenge the existing paradigm, often start with something small. It takes a significant amount of development, reiterations and changes to make it compatible with existing infrastructure and platforms.

ORM (Object relational mapping) tools started a long time back. But it took years to reach a level where you can simply relay on ORM to do everything with the database. In initial year if you used ORM, you still had to use native SQL to do lot of work. Sometime simply the dialect or driver wasn’t available or compatible.

Not Suited for your use case

We are in a world that changes at an exponential rate. Whenever we see something fancy, we just want to play with it, try it out. In this love, we just use it with our app and later realize that we are using a very small part of it.

Blockchain, one of the great technologies of our time. I have seen people using it for trivial use cases like Content Management System_. Such a waste of technology, right?_

Real-life failure: I was working on a project where a portal framework was in use. It used to take a minimum of 4GB of RAM to run the container itself, not to consider hardware requirements for development. where you need to run IDE, Database and other tools. After a year of work, we found ourselves using only 5% of the features. The framework had great features but was not needed for us!

Not adding any business value

Every business uses technology. You cannot imagine a business without technology. Still, there is one thing that distinguishes them

Technology is core of your business. (Examples: Software Development, Innovation and R&D companies)
Business using technology to support/improve business. (Examples: Manufacturing, Business Consulting, Real estate etc.)

In these two categories, we can definitely say that the first ones whose core function is technology/IT innovation need to stay on the top and needs to do a lot of research and innovations. Like FB, Google, IT servicing companies, Companies developing tools for the market.

In other ones, the core function is not technology. Business value is derived from core functions, technology works as support. In these scenarios keeping the tools/applications up to date may sound like an ideal approach but doesn’t add much to business. Sometimes these upgrades even cost way more than value added.

Use it if its useful for you not because everyone else doing it

People

You need people to create and maintain a application. We all know rare techs face challenges finding right talent for it. Better not end-up in a situation, what recruitment industry call it Resource Crunch.

Learning from everyone else is great, don’t follow them!

These are some thoughts from my experience. Hope it help you make a informed decision.