Maintain or Modernise? - Coping with new technologies

"Maintain or Modernise? - Coping with New Technologies"

Debbie McLaughlin and Daniel Bartlett | Published in the MIS Australia magazine - April 2011 Issue

The accelerating pace of technological developments mean that organisations face tough choices between retaining existing investments or taking the leap to the next big thing.

As organisations respond to new forms of competition and changing staff and community expectations, they are undergoing fundamental change in their business models and workplace practices. To support these ambitious transformation agendas, CIO’s are facing increasing pressure to make generational change in their underlying technology platforms.

Businesses are demanding technologies that support a range of initiatives designed to enhance user experience, improve agility, increase productivity and ultimately increase revenue. They are looking for key enablers that de-couple business processes from physical locations, provide increased flexibility to deal with business cycles and support on-line activities via multiple channels. Staff expectations are also now influencing technology decisions, as employees seek to bring their personal technologies into the workplace environment and push for an increasing range of work anywhere anytime options.

Technologies at the forefront of these initiatives include mobility, collaboration, social computing, unified communications and cloud. While take-up of these technologies is well progressed, with between 9% (social computing) and 16% (mobile applications) of organisations having already implemented, many organisations are still in the early phases of considering whether to proceed.

So, in today’s fiercely competitive business environment and with constant pressures on spending, how does a CIO choose between maintaining the current state or modernising to these latest technologies? Traditionally, when it comes to adapting to new technologies, organisations have fallen into one of three mindsets :

Early Adopters – are focused on rapidly achieving business advantage. While they take steps to minimise potential downsides, they adopt a mindset of dealing with unproven technologies and have a willingness to write off failed investments to deal with unpredictable outcomes.

Followers - will invest to keep pace with competitors and restrict IT cost growth, but typically only where the costs and risks of adoption are predictable, and the benefits understood. Followers prosper where market pressures are less intense or where business is stable and predictable.

Late adopters - hold on to their proven, established technologies, are typically cost driven and focus on squeezing every last dollar from their IT. Change is seen as both a cost and a risk, and only when the business is actively suffering can a case be made to modernise.

There is no correct or incorrect ‘modernisation’ mindset, as what is right for an organisation is a point in time question that depends on the nature of the business and its competitive landscape, the organisation’s propensity to take on risk and its current financial situation.

For those still in the wait and see phase of potentially implementing new workplace technologies, what are the key challenges and lessons that have emerged so far ?

1. Beware buyer - some workplace technologies are still immature or unproven in large scale implementations, resulting in business disruption and extended roll out timeframes.
2. Impact - Predicting the impact of new technologies on corporate networks, system performance and transaction response times has proven difficult and added significant unforseen cost to some projects.
3. Complexity - Integrating a large number of disparate technologies and systems to achieve seamless interoperability from a user and client perspective has, to date, represented the biggest challenge from a technology perspective.
4. Data security – How to secure corporate data on mobile devices that are inherently unsecure is challenging for most organisations, particularly as staff increasingly use personal devices for workplace activities. For example, within the healthcare sector, hospital staff are pushing for use of personal devices for recording patient data in real time. The challenge for their IT departments is the need to fundamentally change underlying technology platforms to secure the data and protect against loss.
5. Business change – Extensive business process and workforce management re-engineering is typically required to transform the business delivery model and realise the identified benefits.
6. Managing communications - While implementing social networking technologies is relatively simple, controlling user messaging and making it meaningful to the business is far more difficult.
7. Soft Return on Investment (ROI) - Particularly in the case of social networking, some mobility solutions and collaboration it is often difficult to calculate the actual ROI to the organisation.

The key to pre-empting and dealing with these types of issues is doing your research and knowing your organisation’s technological and change aptitude. Where there is immaturity, you need to build more time and resources into your business case.

Technology investment decisions are not one-off choices but a portfolio of decisions made over time, as to which technologies to adopt now and which to hold off or ignore. Don’t fiddle while Rome burns! Apply the Pareto principle and solve the 20% of problems you are spending 80% of your time on. By judiciously targeting investments and capturing them in a lifecycle management plan, organisations can retain control rather than being taken by surprise while their attention is focussed on the next big thing.