Blog 1 of 3, Evaluating emerging technologies
The approach to evaluating emerging technologies that resonated most was Gartner’s Toolkit Best Practice: Seven Factors to Evaluate When Justifying Investments in Emerging Technologies, for reasons which I will explain in my next posts. But today I will provide an overview of the factors Gartner recommends to create a consistent evaluation approach:
- Evaluate influencing external market forces: identify the variables external to the company that can impact its ability to operate; market trends covers emerging technologies.
- Understand the impact on business scenarios: in light of the long term and short term strategic goals, evaluate emerging technologies against several business scenarios to determine if they meet one or both; preferably both short and long term goals are met.
- Evaluate IT’s strategic opportunities and risks: analyze the business’ current and target states and bump up against IT’s to determine opportunities and gaps of implementing emerging technologies.
- Evaluate the technology’s role in the IT portfolio: determine how the emerging technology would or would not fit into the current planned work/services, to include how it could be prioritized in light of resource allocation, training and education, and work development.
- Understand the impact on the program and project management plan: assist program and project managers on high-level plans and business case processes—emerging technologies are hard to gauge, so IT help is appreciated.
- Define key business metrics: devise and align IT metrics to the strategic outcomes to show how business value will be achieved and at what milestones.
- Define governance policies: establish separate policies, processes, and procedures for governing emerging technologies—they vary greatly from mature technologies.
In the next two blogs, I will cover my reasons for why Gartner’s evaluation approach relates to my experiences.
Blog 2 of 3, Evaluating emerging technologies
First reason Gartner’s evaluation approach for emerging technologies resonated is because of my observations and experiences as a Business Architect. I take strategies and I deconstruct them to the point the execution teams can understand and consume it. As I read thru the evaluation factors, I had the following thoughts represented in the table below:
Factor | Experiences |
1. Evaluate influencing external market forces | All too often the strategist lacks deep technical experience–they are consultant-like and have a general knowledge about a wide spectrum of topics. By the time I get the strategy and engage my technical architect they are behind the curve and have many questions and insights. This can lead to delays, as we have to go back and calibrate with the strategist. Just recently, we hired a CTO strategist in corporate strategy. This will bring the evaluation of emerging technologies upstream, where it should be. |
2. Understand the impact on business scenarios | |
3. Evaluate IT’s strategic opportunities and risks | |
4. Evaluate the technology’s role in the IT portfolio | |
5. Understand the impact on the program and project management plan | This sound very waterfall-ish in addition to skipping the vital step that business architecture plays in the strategy-to-execution process. How I see this working with agile and with business architecture: once the strategy is delivered, I determine the business capability gaps that will prevent achievement of the strategy and coordinate with the people, process, information, and technology “architects” to fill the gaps, which come in the form of agile epics and features. The domain business architects work with the program and project managers to breakdown to stories, aligning measures that tie back to the business outcomes. At the point program and project managers are engaged, they start building the business cases and projected execution plans. I think the technical architects should assist them with the nuances of emerging technologies. All too often, the business cases appear non-viable because they are evaluated as mature technologies. CTO could provide real value at this stage, which I will suggest on my current engagement. |
6. Define key business metrics | Metrics need to be deconstructed just as the rest of the strategy. When each agile execution effort kicks-off, the domain business architect has the role of capturing what each effort will deliver and how it relates back to the strategy’s business outcomes. This is paramount to forming the feedback loop of all work, just not IT. |
7. Define governance policies | I have no experience with governance, but it makes sense that emerging technologies require more latitude and scrutiny. |
Blog 3 of 3, Evaluating emerging technologies
For this post, I wanted to address my experiences with evaluating emerging technologies from an innovation lens. About eight years ago, I stood up business innovation at USAA, along with seven colleagues. I created a uniform evaluation process for each idea we received, called “innovation stage gate.” Essentially, it was a process for developing a business case for an idea, but giving a toll gate at the end of each stage to determine if it would proceed further or stop. Problem was that we had an IT innovation group in CTO, while we resided in the business at the enterprise level. It was a major disconnect, or misalignment, as they were working on emerging technologies/innovations in a vacuum, without business sponsorship.
One of the business innovations was so successful, part of our team branched off to support it, leaving us with three business innovators. We had to re-brand ourselves and really decide how to structure for success. The recommendation we made was to merge our innovation group with IT. It changed innovation as we knew it, growing our idea portfolio from incremental and product innovations to also emerging technologies. We then had IT innovators helping in the stage gate process, with the CTO on the tollgate board. Within months, our team grew substantially to include cross-matrix innovators located within the business, reporting back to us at the enterprise. Shortly thereafter, our CEO was named Innovator of the Year by American Banker. This article notes how we were able to leverage technology to quadruple our assets and drive member (customer) value. Bringing CTO further upstream in strategy and innovation development can be very powerful.