Unlocking Value: Considerations for Assessing New Technologies Before Implementation
How to effectively and efficiently evaluate how new technology can be a benefit to your organization.
Syed Raza
Consultant | Vector Advisory Services, LLC
Given the current landscape of exponential technological innovation, every organization should be asking themselves what they can do to keep up with the advancing technical environment. Technological infrastructure is growing increasingly effective in providing businesses with time saving and performance enhancing opportunities whether it may be in the form of advanced hardware capable of streamlining upscaled operations, or software systems targeted towards more efficient and cohesive task completion.
While these advantages are widely accepted and new technology is being adopted across all sectors, where should an organization start the process of technical upscaling?
Considering the Implementation Costs of a Product
There are three types of costs associated with implementing a new product or system into your organization’s technical environment: direct capital expenses, time expenditure, and costs to employees. All of these costs will play a part in determining if the implementation of a product is viable for your organization.
Direct Expenses: The most obvious cost associated with ramping up a new software product or integrating a new hardware product into your business ecosystem is the cost to acquire the product. Upfront purchase price and/or costs for subscriptions are important to consider, but depending on your organization’s resources these may represent the beginning of the direct monetary expense to implement a new system. Maintenance costs, possible personnel additions such as system administrators, and decommissioning legacy systems are all direct costs to be considered.
Time Expenditure: Depending on the complexity of the product being considered, implementation can take weeks or months, even up to a year. Your organization’s ongoing initiatives that are dependent on the legacy system may face delays during the process. Hardware implementation is less time consuming generally, but system downtime is to be expected during installation, testing, and configuration of the new hardware device. Data loss and timeline shifts are the greatest factors to consider when gauging if the timeline of implementation fits your organization’s needs.
Costs to Employees: Determining how to best equip your team to leverage new products or systems is an important step in maximizing the value of technological additions. The willingness of established teams to adopt new processes integrating new technologies is often a limiting factor, so gathering information about the team’s attitude regarding migrating to a new system or utilizing new technology will allow your organization to gain an initial determination of the viability of the implementation. The team(s) that will be using the new product or system will also need to possess the technical aptitude to learn how to use it, or may need additional training from the product’s vendor.
Considering Scalability
The final consideration is scalability. Assess your organization’s business model, the future growth your organization seeks, and the direction that your organization will go. Do you see this technology having to be replaced as your organization grows? Can this addition help push your organization towards its goals? Will your current business processes be streamlined with this addition?
Asking these questions can clarify the ability of prospective new technology to grow your organization and grow with your organization. Initial growth can come from immediate improvements to processes and productivity, while long-term growth will come from effective product scaling.
Establishing training processes for new users, internal maintenance structure, and system interoperability are all strong determinants of successful long-run product scaling.
New User Training: Take into account your organization’s industry, the personnel that will be coming into the organization, and what their roles would be. Looking at the way the new product or system works, is it feasible to establish new user training protocols that effectively allow these new users to leverage the tool effectively? Some software systems are much more intuitive than others, and depending on the experience of new personnel entering an organization, there may be a smaller learning curve for certain hardware. However the converse can be true as well, which may prove to dampen the anticipated synergy provided by the implementation of new technology.
Internal Maintenance Structure: If a product is used by a specific subset of the organization, or if internal administrators are present, is the usefulness of the product completely reliant on these personnel? If the system administrator decides to take the rest of the week off, will it inhibit work processes dependent on the system? Understanding the permissions structure of software products and effective knowledge transfer are vital to scale a new product with your organization.
System Interoperability: Ensuring that hardware components or software products are aligned with the current ecosystem is important to immediate success in implementation, but projecting your organization’s future technical needs will determine if the product can scale or if it will need to be replaced as your organization evolves. Looking for products that come from producers with diverse offerings, or considering the infrastructure that a product is built on will allow your organization to determine if a product’s useful life overlaps with your organization’s trajectory.
Leveraging new technology can provide your business with a significant edge in fostering growth. Using these considerations can provide your organization with a strong basis for making decisions regarding the best way for your organization to adopt new technologies as they continue to arise. Vector Advisory’s team is composed of experienced decision makers with backgrounds including ERP implementation, SaaS design, and software testing to help navigate the complexities of leveraging new technology to optimize business value.
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