New Technologies Appear In Some Locations That Offer New Opportunities

Technology advances relentlessly. The pace of technology tends to be uneven due to the unpredictability of breakthroughs. While there have been many successes, it can be argued that there have been many failures. Widespread deployment of PCs in the 1980s often led to lowered productivity without networking. More recently, the adoption of portable, handheld devices has found to be wasteful since there were no real business applications. To take advantage of new technology requires a company to assess the following:

What are the real benefits of the technology?
If the technology is not pursued, what are the impacts?
Are competitors likely to use the technology soon?
Is the technology sufficiently mature to be able to be placed in many countries around the world?
Is there sufficient infrastructure of support available?

Answering these questions can lead you to defer the new technology until it has matured.

Impact

New technology has benefits, but it is also disruptive. Everything around the technology is affected. Thus, it has been the case that while there are long-term benefits, the short-term effects of the new technology are quite negative.

Prevention

There should be a technology watch capability in companies of substantial size. This provides an early warning to new technologies. The company can then be more selective and follow a proactive approach to the selected technology. Unfortunately, much technology is adopted in a reactive mode that is not fully thought through.

Action

If a technology has been adopted for use in a company, one of the parts of the project should be an assessment to determine the readiness of each company location to accept and use the technology.