While speaking to Walt Mossberg, principal technology columnist for Wall Street Journal, during an interview at the D8 Conference, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc., made several interesting observations. Replying to a question on why Apple does not support Adobe’s Flash technology on its devices like the iPod, iPad and iPhone, he made a remark that may hold true for several technology organisations. Jobs said that Apple, as a company, does not have ample resources as other technology firms.

Therefore, they choose which horses to ride carefully, and then ride with all their might. He also compared technology life-cycle to seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter.

And, he said that they invest in the technology that is "in its spring". He was referring to HTML5 here, which is an emerging standard, and Flash, which according to him, has lost its sheen. He added that Flash was revolutionary for its time, but now has had its day.

However, HTML5 is the future and Apple will invest in it.

The whole world is commenting on Apple's decision. Some believe that it is the company’s closed technology policy; others say that Apple could have lost control had it allowed Flash on its platform. The debate is endless. Is there a brighter side?

Being technology heads, you can certainly take cues from Apple’s decision—should you invest in the spring of IT, or should you wait for summer to set in.

While speaking to CIOs, the impression that I formed was that they would rather wait for summer. CIOs would rather invest in a technology only when it is mature and tested, before implementing it in the production environment. This is a perfectly valid approach.

But, this is also an approach that could kill innovation and growth in your environment. With rapidly changing businesses, it may not be long before you grow out of your tried and tested technologies.

So what do you do? You certainly do not have endless resources at your disposal, so how can you ensure that you are innovative and secure and still promise the best quality service. The matter is again about choosing your horses carefully. Ensure that the technologies you are looking at to implement in your business align with your business goals and are forward looking at the same time.

For instance, throwing servers or people may look like the easiest solution for capacity building. It has worked for many years now. However, if you keep doing this, it will not be long before you grow out of your IT facility—virtualisation and infrastructure management solutions could be the answer.

There are several CIOs who have reduced their carbon footprint, power and space requirements by virtualising servers. Not only that, they have been able to provide better services to organisations by being able to provide on-demand servers. It has also helped them in scalability. Adding servers to their infrastructure was never easier.

Still others are using powerful infrastructure management tools that automate a whole lot of the above mentioned processes.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Would you like to be safe, or would you like to be forward looking? Do let me know.