The fall of Borders is a sad event in the literature world. CIO.com reports on the failures that the bookstore went through because of their failed IT support. Boston clients of ours have said that having a solid IT support team is important and if only Borders knew that, they might still be alive. Check out some of the article below.
Is there anything left for IT people to learn from the collapse of Borders? Sadly, yes. Sure, we’ve all heard — endlessly — that Borders went bankrupt because it farmed out its Web store to Amazon.com in 2001, failed to develop its own Kindle knockoff and was late to jump into e-books. But that’s just technology. What are the IT lessons?
Lesson 1: Lose your IT-savvy management, lose your way. Tom and Louis Borders didn’t just start a bookstore in 1971. They also developed a sophisticated inventory management system that used a mainframe punch card in each book to track and adjust inventory on a near-real-time basis. That system, called Expert, was the main reason Kmart bought Borders in 1992 — Kmart wanted to use Expert to manage its huge Waldenbooks chain. But almost as soon as the sale closed, the brothers Borders cashed out and left. Borders never had truly IT-savvy management again.
Lesson 2: Sometimes even the best technology doesn’t scale. In 1992, the Borders Expert System worked really well for 22 Borders stores. It never really did the job for 1,100 Waldenbooks stores — and as Borders grew, Expert couldn’t scale for it, either. Still, for a decade, no one in IT was able to convince management to reinvent Expert.
IT services are important which is shown brightly in this article. Is your Boston based business using sound tech support?
