Infoworld has a great article that lays out The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid. My absolute favorite in this article is number 16, Clinging to prior solutions. With it’s real world example that closely mirrors my own experience, it articulately describes the idiocy in blindly using a solution just because it’s been done before.

I have seen that this mentality is especially true when moving from one form of development to another. Manager X might say, “Company A was our way of life in the client server world, so we must use their unproven track record for N-Tier development. They may be slower to market, and be playing catch up to the other industry leaders, but we’ll simply stick with them, and not rock the boat.” Inevitably, this approach will fail. Why? Because you can not simply force solutions that worked before into a new environment without taking into consideration how the new environment should work. It could very well be that Company A does not fully understand the environment you are migrating into, and thus you will be stuck with a mish-mash of technologies and be worse off than sticking with your old solution.

Whether it is changing technologies or moving into a new field of interest, it is foolish to try and simply apply old tricks to a new strategy.