Telecom & Technology Consulting
Whether it’s the cloud, AI, The Internet of Things (IoT), and other emerging technologies, you have to know when to give the latest thing a chance. Somehow, you have balance the innovation necessary for growth with the risk management required to avoid disaster.
It’s not easy. As much as the said technology offers promise, there are legitimate question marks. Is it secure? Is it better to be an early adopter and leap ahead of the competition, or is it wise to implement later when you can learn from others’ mistakes? Can you fully explain the use cases to stakeholders and why it’s worth the often-massive investment? Will the technology cause too much of a disruption in businesses processes?
These questions can cause consternation among tech leaders. However, they can feel more confident when using a repeatable approach for assessing new technologies.
First, create a small team of enthusiasts who are motivated to ensure success. The grounding idea is to understand how to leverage the specific technology in a way that benefits the enterprise.
This way, if you experience failure, you’ll know there was a genuine effort to make things work, rather than a half-hearted try from those who were skeptical of the emerging technology itself.
Also empower that team to leverage the tech without any restrictions or limitations. This means trying a number of versions and vendors of the solution you’re testing. While this approach may seem challenging, it may actually be much easier than you anticipated, as the team will gain a valuable lesson of when to use which solution.
Along those lines, be sure to learn and adapt the technology as it is officially intended to be implemented and used by employees and/or consumers. By being strict with how the technology was meant to be used, your team can genuinely – without ambiguity – identify the true benefits of the technology.
Once you learn how to use the technology and how it will provide specific advantages (for users and the business), do the opposite. Tear it down. Move the solution beyond its operating capacity to understand how it can fall apart when pushed outside of its comfort zone.
As part of this process, assess as many scenarios as you can to see where the technology fails –or fails to live up to the vendor’s promise of performance. This provides you with a real grasp of how failures could impact your organization, on both a daily operational level and long-term.
Of course, security is paramount when assessing the viability of any new technology. Accordingly, perform tests to measure the technology’s security impact as it relates to public and private data housed in your network. This is key – even if you like how the solution performs, it’s no use if security is weak and leaves your business prone to data breaches.
After all of the aforementioned tests, you should have a complete understanding of how the technology can help your organization. But there’s still much work to be done before you can be confident to buy the solution or move on to something else.
For example, focus on internal efficiencies and optimizations that have distinct measurable outcomes. At this point you might be thinking it’s time to look at business use cases, but internal use cases are actually where your team can best pinpoint if the technology can provide a positive impact. Test how users from different departments react to the functionality. Are they easily able to perform critical tasks, or does the user experience cause inefficiencies?
Now your team be will properly equipped to test common business use cases, and how they can impact (both positively and negatively) revenue and reputation. First share the technology with internal teams, and then choose a select group of trusted customers to get their feedback.
Technologies will come and go. Don’t get caught flat-footed when the new “paradigm-shifting” solution rears it head. There is hype and there is promise. When you have a process of assessing emerging technology, it’ll be easier to tell if you should buy or walk away.
