In this post we are going to take a look at six primary factors you should consider before adopting a new technology for your product.
Priority
Things which matter most should never be at the mercy of
things which matter least.
-- Johann Wolfgang Van Goethe
Before everything else, you should first try to answer this question of "Why moving to this new technology is a priority?". Why do you want to place this particular endeavor above all else? What kind of improvements are we looking at if we adopt this particular technology in question for our products and services? What sort of advantages it provides us over the current technology in the first place?
It is only at a later point that an organization or a team realizes that they took too much to chew. With this realization comes the problem of focusing on the right items in the business roadmap. Oftentimes many people will feel that everything is paramount and nothing could be thrown out without major impacts.
Leadership teams in most of the organizations inadvertently assign priority-setting exercises to their people, without clarifying the primary objectives. And these people with their limited sense of their organization's strategy and their ability end up choosing the wrong order for priority. This results in serious alignment issues among the different business stakeholders frequently.
Relevancy
You must add value to yourself to be relevant
ā Sunday Adelaja
How this new technology is relevant to our business requirements and customer needs? We need to have clear answer whether the new technology increases the likelihood of accomplishing the intended goal of the business on the event of successful adoption. Sometimes it is possible to measure the impact or sometimes it is not. We might not have a direct tool or metric to measure the relation between the return of investment and the technology. And if we are not able to measure, that necessarily doesn't mean that there is no improvement.
Prepare yourself well in advance to face a barrage of questions and doubts about the importance of technology in business and believe that it can transform the way you work.
Inadequacy
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy,
never really goes away. You just have to trudge
ahead in the rain, regardless.
ā Lorrie Moore
Try to figure out what is really lacking in your current technology. How much flexibility we are losing if we are not moving to the new one? Of course, flexibility is an abstract concept, we really won't be able to find a tangible evidence or concrete number to gauge it. But the lack of flexibility is apparent if we do a qualitative comparison between the old and the new technologies. The deficiency of the old systems will become obvious if we really know and understand the possibilities in the new systems.
Cost
Everything comes at a cost, Just what are you
willing to pay for it.
-- Serena Williams
Cost is the crucial factor for every business or organization to decide upon whether we should stay with the status quo or move to a new technology. We should have some approximate idea about the cost differences or savings we would be having with either staying with the current technology or adopting a new one.
Efficiency
Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.
-- Peter Drucker
With efficiency as one of your core factors for choosing technology, you can achieve your goals with as little expense and effort as possible. And with the right technology you can do it without producing too much waste. It's all about leveraging technology to the fullest potential.
With a better and novel technology it is possible to achieve peak level of performance that uses the least amount of inputs to achieve the highest amount of output. It is also capable of reducing the number of unnecessary resources used to produce a given output, including personal time and energy, thereby boosting the productivity of teams and organizations.
Constraints
Problems are hidden opportunities, and constraints can actually boost creativity.
-- Martin Villeneuve.
What are the old operating conditions for the current technology? Are the constraints significantly different today, than it used to be in the past? Understanding and knowing the differences in constraints and conditions under which our products are services are developed, will often lead to better clarity in why we need to adopt a new technology.
You might have chosen a different technology for various reasons in the past, most of which might have become obsolete or invalid under present circumstances. This is quite normal with technology, since the pace at which it is evolving is far rapid than our reasoning.
That's it
Hope you get the basic criteria for adopting a new technology right for your business. If you think there are also some other important factors to consider before endorsing a new technology, please let me know your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
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