Adopting new technologies requires organisational and cultural change
“In the information age, the best of times are the worst of times[1]” — a remark by Andrew McAfee[2], the well-known author on technology and change in business. He was pointing to the difficulty companies face in deciding which technology is best for their business, which ones they should acquire and how they should adapt them successfully. Ask yourself these questions:
Why would customers start confessing their most intimate desires to your new CRM system[3]?
Why would suppliers start delivering just in time the moment an SCM system[4] is implemented?
Why would a BI[5] dashboard immediately improve the company's decision-making process?
There is no magic here. Most technology projects that fail to produce the expected results do so because the organisation adopted them poorly.
To secure success, McAfee proposes the following roles for executives in the technology adoption process:
Helping select the technologies
Encouraging their adoption
Ensuring they are exploited
Executives have to stop seeing technology projects as technical installations and start understanding them as stages of organisational change that they are responsible for managing. That is why people talk about a digital ecosystem: the union of the human being with technology.
At the centre of that whole ecosystem sit the analytical systems — business intelligence, predictive analytics, automated scenario-based decisions, data mining, artificial intelligence and others — which have been capturing our attention with:
Their demonstrated ability to automate decision-making
Their increasingly well-developed visualisation environments
Their capacity to generate high-impact insights
The possibility of obtaining information from any electronic device.
Thinking differently in order to adopt technology in the company immediately and efficiently is a challenge. It requires strong sponsors who act as drivers of the change, and a cultural shift in the organisation towards embracing technology as an ally rather than as something negative that will erode employment.
A company's technological development has to be accompanied by strategic partners who understand the value of technology as an agent of change that brings improvements to the business. Those strategic partners are none other than the managers: they are the ones called on to defuse people's natural resistance to the changes these new technologies bring.
Independently of that, analytical systems and their implementation require solid, experienced business partners who help select the best technological alternative, support the design of adoption strategies and make it easier for companies to get value out of them.
[1] From “Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology”, Harvard Business Review, November 2006. [2] Andrew Paul McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy; his recent book is Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future. [3] CRM: customer relationship management systems. [4] SCM: supply chain management systems. [5] BI: business intelligence systems.
