Implementing new technology
There are funny and horrible stories of the trials and tribulations associated with the transfer of technology and the implementation of new systems and architecture. There are lessons we can learn from those who have blazed trails before us and from those who have been burned by the flames. Prepare your fingers to count the five fundamental considerations to implement new technologies.
What we learned from Oracle
“The original plan was to transition our existing IT infrastructure to Oracle within three months. Three years have passed and we believe we are almost done with our Oracle implementation.” Does this sound familiar? if so, you have a lot of good company. Oracle is a powerful engine. It’s high-octane, scalable, and has a flexible object-oriented architecture to allow for continuous growth and integration. So what went wrong?
Too often, in the eager anticipation of installing the latest and greatest engine, the other parts of the car were forgotten or overlooked. Sure you have a powerful new engine, but your steering wheel is gone. It was replaced by a series of point-and-click dropdown boxes to precisely tell the car to turn at a specific angle. Do you want to do a 30-degree turn, a forty-degree turn, or a 90-degree turn, left or right? Simply choose the appropriate item from the drop down menu and you will have the exact turn you want. Gone is the outdated and imprecise steering wheel that required manual intervention and guidance to gradually adjust the turning process, and the mouse-operated precision turning device has been installed. The problem is that no one mentioned that the new steering gear was sold separately and would take another six months to program. No one mentioned that everyone responsible for driving the car would have to learn a new steering methodology, lose the ability to make manual adjustments along the way, and learn to be more predictive and precise in selecting the right turn. Adjustments can be made along the way to correct a spin, with more point-and-click menu selections if necessary. Additional time, design and development costs, and employee training are sold separately. You see, Oracles sells that mighty motor, not the flywheel.
Does it sound funny or familiar? If it sounds familiar, then the humor is bittersweet. If it sounds ridiculous, then you haven’t experienced it yet. The steering wheel is just one example. Once the steering gear is programmed and in place, the other discoveries begin. That powerful engine comes with a speedometer and tachometer, so you can see your performance and engine RPM. Isn’t it exciting to see that you have only partially harnessed the incredible power of this magnificent engine from Oracle? Unfortunately, if you rely on other dash devices, such as turn signals, air conditioning, or a radio, then you have to build these things yourself. After all, engine engineers realize that you turn in different paths than everyone else, you have personal preferences for your climate controls, and you have personal preferences for Sirius or terrestrial satellite radio stations. Therefore, you should create your point-and-click objects, menus, and radio buttons to suit your personal preferences and all possible variations thereof. Someone forgot to mention that all of these features and amenities need to be custom designed for each driver.
Once the common board and control devices are designed, developed, and implemented, the next wave of discovery begins. The old buttons, knobs and dials are gone. Everything has been replaced by the convenient control of a single device, your mouse. That seemed like a wonderful comfort when we first described it to you. All controls are on two fingers on one hand. Once you’ve gotten through the pain of installing all the other controls at extra cost, it may occur to you that it might be a little tricky to switch between driving the car, sending a command to roll up the windows, turning on the air conditioning, selecting a station. radio and signaling your turn, all at the same time with a single device. All of these things require a different set of menus, so you have to choose your workflow very carefully. Otherwise, he may crash into the back of a truck while trying to turn off the heater and turn on Howard Stern. Just then he starts to rain and you realize the wipers haven’t been coded yet.
Dear Larry Ellison, Forgive me if my sense of irony has inadvertently presented what might be perceived as an unflattering comment. It is merely intended to provide a comment on proper planning for the technology transition. After all, you build a beautiful engine.
So what should we do?
1) Be aggressive
It is appropriate to be aggressive when implementing a new technology that provides a competitive advantage. The competitive advantage can be related to the overall performance of the system that allows employees to be more productive. A competitive advantage may be a utility that allows customers to become more self-sufficient, such as installing the ATM outside the bank for the convenience of customer self-sufficiency. Competitive advantage can integrate multiple functions, partners, or data streams that enable smarter decisions or effective business. If the implementation, integration or transfer of new technology is going to have a substantial and measured competitive advantage, then be aggressive in the search for technology.
2) Be cautious
If technology transfer touches your business’s core competency or revenue, be careful when making significant changes. This does not mean that you avoid improving the technology. It simply implies that it is appropriate to be more cautious when studying branches and helpers that can be affected by even a subtle change in code. There are horror stories of companies implementing seemingly innocuous billing changes and then failing to produce invoices or statements for customers. During this period of technology transfer, the income suddenly dropped. The result created financial hardship for the billing company and for disgruntled customers who suddenly received several months of backlog billing once the billing system issues were resolved. This not only had an impact on cash flow during the billing interruption, but also affected the relationship with customers. Be aggressive with competitive opportunities to increase your profits and performance, but be careful when it comes to implementing changes that may affect your core business offerings, customers, or billing.
3) Be quick
Be quick to implement minor changes and carefully monitor the impact. When it comes to improving performance, internal suggestions to simplify routines or improve the customer experience don’t linger. Design small changes, test them thoroughly, and create a schedule to consistently implement improvements. Very often, small improvements have the biggest impact on business performance.
4) Be slow
When it comes to major changes to the architecture or systems that support your business, be slow to implement the change. Often the core architecture and business functions are the most efficient and optimized. The processes that are used the most get the most attention and are often the most evolved. Unfortunately, these are also the processes that are normally selected as the first priority when it comes to implementing a technology transfer. Instead, avoid the lure of focusing on familiar ground and stick with primary processes until the transition has been tested in some of the lesser-used and more complex utilities. By focusing development on the most complex and least used features, you can gain great insight through experience and have the least business impact. There are too many horror stories of companies that enthusiastically ported core processes and then spent months or years fixing bugs that might have been identified by developing a much less necessary or impactful part of the process.
5) Stay safe
There is no better time to address the wide range of potential security needs than during the design, development, and implementation of new technologies. What personal data to manage, process, forward or store? This is not limited to credit card transactions or bank account numbers for electronic transfers. Somewhere in the huge data files, you probably have valuable private information about each of your own employees. Employee records contain social security numbers, direct deposit bank accounts, names and addresses, and possibly even references to health coverage. Too often we think about the pipeline to our customers and forget about the gold mine of private information within our own facilities. Don’t we owe the same protection to our own employees?
Privacy data may include medical records, financial records, and personal information. Driver’s license numbers, credit card numbers, or even matching email addresses with phone numbers are potential privacy risks. The threat is not limited to the way people access information from the outside, or the number of firewalls you put in place. The threat also comes from within, and what kind of information is available to employees and associates. How easy is it to look up customer records and download the information to a USB stick? How easy is it to copy the entire company database with customer information, account information, or intellectual property? What value would it be to a disgruntled employee to take valuable information from a customer to a competitor?
There’s no better time than the present for a security expert to assess potential privacy breaches in your organization. If you have customers, credit cards, customer accounts, customer information, intellectual property, financial information, medical information, or employee information stored electronically, accessible on a network, or printed on file, then it’s time to consider security.
If you are in the midst of preparing for a technology transformation, design, development, integration, or deployment, then now is the perfect time to review all related documents with a security and privacy expert. If you’re organizing all this information, why not leverage your efforts to protect your customers, your employees, and your business? Executives and management are increasingly responsible for ignoring or overlooking potential security breaches in their respective organizations, both to protect customers from external threats and to control the actions of disgruntled employees. Mitigate risk to the company and company executives, taking appropriate and reasonable precautions for expert analysis, controls, and privacy.
words of wisdom
“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they don’t understand, and those who understand what they don’t.”
– Putt’s Law
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve quality of life, press three.”
-Alice Khan
“There’s a bad tendency underlying all of our technology: the tendency to do what’s reasonable even when it’s not good.”
-Roberto Pirsig
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
-R. Buckminster Fuller