Business Acclimation to New Technology

Preparing for the arrival of a new system or technology can be an exciting time. The anticipated rewards of saving your organization time and effort, coupled with new reporting and business insight capabilities, all raise the prospects of successfully meeting the challenges ahead and handling the unanticipated exceptions that may occur along the way.

It is easy and natural to anticipate these benefits. But do we always anticipate the design and effort required by the business to accept a new technology into the business process? In other words, do we anticipate the necessary acclimation required by the business to take ownership of the new technology or system?

New technologies and systems are proven successful when the business acclimates to the new technology by successfully integrating the technology into their business process to provide the anticipated rewards. You know when this may not be happening when you start hearing about workarounds. When business principals need to institute workarounds in their process just to satisfy a particular set of system features, the business process itself can become warped and burdened with additional confusion and expended effort, which can cost the organization greatly. This trends a reversal in all of those great benefits and rewards the technology should be delivering.

So how can we avoid these reversal-of-fortune situations? We need to consider the matter from both the technology and business point of view.

On the technology side, we need to remind ourselves that our technology solutions, particularly custom and niche systems, should be designed and tested alongside the business model. The technology is not an entity unto itself but supports an important function of the business. Our technology solutions should also be capable of extension, to facilitate adaptation to the changing conditions in business processes. These two points can and should be continually tested and validated throughout the design and development process. This testing does not need to wait until a full system exists, as it is better to correct or dispel any incorrect assumptions early on in the life cycle.

On the business side, we need to remind ourselves to consider how the new technology will integrate into our business process. We need to ask ourselves these questions:

- Will the new technology be a fit for the capabilities of our organization and its people?
- Can we realistically analyze the weaknesses in our own business processes, and look to see how and where technology can assist?
- Are we able to pre-consider and design up-front any workarounds that may be necessary to work with the technology, but still realize the full benefit?
- Can we keep pace with the education, testing, parallel processing, and gradual rollout necessary to take ownership of this new technology? Or are we seeking a solution to arrive on our desks first before taking any further action?

Business acclimation to new technology deserves some serious consideration, and should be factored into any SDLC and project plans. If we do not, then we only increase the risk of our business processes ending up as slaves to our technology, rather than having the technology out there working for us where it belongs.