Jabit

I’ve seen it again recently. This is the scenario. A business decides that it wants to adopt technology in an effort to address some identified issue or capitalise on some identified opportunity. Hopefully it doesn’t start with wanting to adopt technology (although it often does) but rather wanting to improve the business. Either way, the business puts a lot of effort into capturing the requirements of the technical solution and then identifying or developing an appropriate solution. These pre-adoption stages are often heavily influenced by people who are technology savvy, who often want the technology for the sake of the technology itself. The "adoption team" slowly starts to loose sight of the issue/opportunity it is seeking to address and become immersed, and somewhat dazzled, in the technology on offer. The project moves into the deployment phase and the technology is finally switched on. The project team disband (or seriously slows down) as they feel their job is done. The original issue/opportunity remains, for the large part, un-addresses.

The adoption of technology into a business is as much about organisational development as it is about aligning business goals with technology solutions. The organisation has to be prepared for the change the technology will bring about. Peoples fears have to be addresses up-front, training has to be provided and new behaviours have to be enforced. The whole change process has to be effectively managed. If not, then the best one can hope for is that the performance of the business remains unaffected. At worst, business performance will decline.