2. Fear

Why did normally sane investors pour their money into now worthless Internet stocks? They were afraid of missing out on The Next Big Thing. The same fear inspired otherwise pragmatic corporate officers to start blindly buying pricey software that they were incapable of implementing quickly. They were seduced by the promise that implementing the software package would improve efficiency - whether by moving procurement online, by setting up self-service e-commerce Web sites for customers, or by Webifying interactions with suppliers. "People at the CEO and COO and board level were all so fired up about IT when the bull market was going on that no one wanted to be left out," says Kevin O'Marah, a research director at AMR Research. "Risk aversion had a lot to do with why people . . . bought all that software."

Fear has a price, and a hefty one at that: from 1999 to 2001, the top 10 business-to-business e-commerce and enterprise resource planning vendors sold $US55 billion in software, says O'Marah. Large customers each spent more than a million dollars a pop at multiple vendors. Those that have implemented one or two of their CRM and SCM modules are happy with the results they've achieved so far, O'Marah says. But they've still got lots of software sitting on the shelf. And maybe they're feeling a little less urgency to install it now that dotcom pressure has subsided.

Shelfware Buster: Take stock of what you have, and set priorities for its implementation.

Take heart - that fancy new e-business software isn't a waste (even if all of those Internet stock investments were). "Learn how to use it," O'Marah says. "The stuff does work." But don't rush out and install all of those unused software modules willy-nilly. O'Marah recommends inventorying all of the uninstalled systems and assessing them on two dimensions: What is their business value? And how difficult will it be to make the technology fit within the company's existing computing environment? Doing this kind of analysis can add some structure to the otherwise political "keep or kill" discussions, he says.

Don't call in consultants to help spur ahead deployment. Instead, O'Marah says, "call up the vendors who sold you all this stuff and who you have support contracts with, and engage them. Have them earn their money and have them give you a hand. They'll earn the right to stay involved, and they'll earn the right to sell you more services." Once you've finished working your way through all the software you've got stockpiled, of course.