How could enterprises prepare for the adoption of exponentially growing technology?
By Markiian
November 21, 2020
In today's market, more executives feel a strong need to bring technology innovation to improve their business productivity and differentiate themself from the competitors. They have a vision, but along with that, there is a concern of how to bring that vision to life in the way to get full benefit without a massive disruption to the working habits.

Based on average data from various industry reports:
  • More than 50% of executives think that rapidly changing tech makes it difficult for their enterprise to embrace it.
  • And more than 90% of them confirm that there is a technology capability gap in their ventures.
To align on the meaning of technology, let's use the simplest classification model which looks at it through 3 angles: software, hardware and managing methodologies.


Does pandemic change anything?
McKinsey's report outlines that those companies that adopt new technology during the pandemic are doing better in terms of revenue. Those who had strong technology capabilities are navigating pandemic confidently in contrast to those who don't.
According to Microsoft, during and after the COVID technology adoption will continue to accelerate.


Technology. Past, today and tomorrow. Does it really grow that fast?

In an article posted at the beginning of the new millennium, Ray Kurzweil outlined that every ten years pace of progress was doubling and that it is not going to be 100 years of progress in this century, but more like 20 000 years of it.

If we take a closer, more segmented look at How fast is technology growing we can confirm that it is true. The world will change faster than we think.


What problems do we have with adoption?

By most tech leaders technology adoption is not considered to be an important topic, because it is too theoretical. But in fact, it gives an ability to think wider, out of the scope of a particular problem space, what usually brings better results. Technology adoption has been studied for years and there are a lot of models that could facilitate thinking and planning of new transformations e.g. Technology Adoption Life Cycle, Gartner hype cycle, Satir Change Model, Paul Adler model.
Even on the basic level, they provide valuable ideas on what should be considered, and what is very often ignored:
  • A lot of enterprises try to move very quickly without giving employees time to get a feel of technology.
  • They don't support implementation and don't cover employees' needs who are performing an adoption.
  • Don't build practices that support the adoption inside the organization.
  • Don't treat variability in performance on the chaos phase (Satir Change Model) with the right attitude. An example is not acknowledging new overhead that is required on this stage e.g. performing PoC, prototypes, because it contradicts their overall understanding of what should be the delivery speed.
  • Technology change pains are not discussed and treated with the required level of importance.

Also, there are other things that we think are contributing to the failed initiatives that underperform.

From the management perspective:
  • Very often leadership sticks to the old-school management approach where decisions are made on the top without giving employees a chance to contribute to the best of their ability.
  • Sometimes, it is hard to think beyond the project scope and how different tech concepts/processes depend on and influence each other.
  • The same about lack of technology leadership capability to assess strategies and understand how to bridge business with a correct technology solution.
  • Struggles of organizations to manage resistance, plan and implement sustainable change

Tech perspective:
  • Blindly adopting technology trends. The vivid case is with microservices architecture that is not required by most of the enterprises, but a lot are trying to build it.
  • Limiting employee's tech view to the scope of one organization and its technology base. They should have channels to observe what is happening outside, gain experience from industry leaders.
  • Technology people should have passion and companies should strive to stimulate that passion and promote an always-learn, continuous growth mindset. Stimulate knowledge sharing, conference visits, companies' RSS technology feeds and case studies.

What could be done about it?

Skills, capabilities and processes outlined above require specialized training and experience that most of the companies simply don't have. It is not their specialization and this is perfectly normal.

It is always a good idea to partner with technology companies and individual technologists whose main business is about understanding how to embrace the latest technology and test/learn how to apply it to solving real-world problems.

Software engineering is a comprehensive discipline on the intersection of UX/UI, business analysis, architecture etc. If UX/UI is done correctly, but the software architecture perspective is lacking behind, the company's ability to test hypotheses and deliver quickly falls to a minimum.

That is why in TageSpot we think more in coarse-grained services proposition rather than fine-grained e.g cyber-security assessment. It doesn't mean that we start doing everything together, but we always maintain a parallel view, showing our clients how important are all other aspects and what should be done about them.

Contact us to get to know about our value proposition and how we could help you to accelerate your growth.
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