Friday, February 17, 2012

Drivers for Emerging Technology Adoption

A question came up recently, regarding the operational feasibility of adopting emerging technology. Among other aspects of this, I identified five environmental factors that increase the operational feasibility of adopting technologies before they are "mainstream" or "mature". This is not specific to an industry.

Clearly there are other operational factors such as culture, funding, business practices, etc. I am not addressing those here.


Five environmental factors will continue to increase the operational feasibility of emerging technologies
in industry:

  1. Consumerization of Technology – Technology once only available for business use is now being mainstreamed for consumers. Employees are asking why the technology in their homes is newer than the technology in the office.
  2. Individually Liable Models – Employees wish to leverage their personal investment in technology and use it in the workplace. Personal smartphones & business email are a prime example of this. Personal laptops and tablets will be the next wave of devices.
  3. New Workers – The Generation Y workers will bring to the workplace both an appreciation of emerging technologies as well as an expectation for using them on the job. If you don't let them use it, then you may have retention & recruiting issues!
  4. Change & Adoption Cycle Time – The cycle time for technologies to emerge, stabilize, and become mainstream is shortening. Cloud computing is mainstream after a few years. In the 80s, client server computing required almost a decade to become mature.
  5. Efficiency – In many cases older technologies are simply not as efficient or portable as the emerging technologies. The transformation of business & government places a renewed emphasis on efficiency in the core mission. Adoption of emerging technologies will be required for continued operational savings.

Summary: External pressure from many areas will force organizations to adopt emerging technologies, or suffer the consequences. 

1 comment:

Derek Brooks said...

Good posting. Implementing a personal device policy is exciting but must be be thoughtful and deliberate. BYOD introduces an entirely new category of liabilities that many organizations have never considered. The right tools and infrastructure must be in place to properly accommodate these new devices if we want to move into this new era successfully.