I spent most of today still being sluggish from all the Thanksgiving eating I did yesterday, but I did start to draft out my rough outline for the individual research assignment in 874.  I found a short blog article that doesn’t really cut the mustard for a scholarly source to use in the paper, but it certainly fits the bill for blog discussion fodder! http://www.ciodashboard.com/technology-innovation/3-approaches-emerging-technology-experimentation/

The short article discusses three types of technology evaluations that organizations can take and they’re pretty high level.  The article reminds me a bit about organizational process maturity.  The three levels are:

• Vendor-Driven –   This is when the organization can’t or won’t evaluate technologies on their own, instead waiting for their vendors to approach THEM with solutions.
• Technology-Driven – This is when the organization begins to experiment with new technologies without any regard for business need or current capability.
• Business-Driven – This is when the organization does experiment with new tech, but first evaluates their current and future capabilities.

So, it’s pretty obvious from the get go that Business Driven is the correct route, so I will talk a bit about how an organization may accidentally end up in one of the two non-optimal situations.

Vendor Driven – Organizations that end up adopting new technologies via their vendors and service providers probably are running a bare bones type of IT outfit.  Low budget, understaffed, the few IT personnel that do exist are likely working on projects very reactivly, e.g. fixing/upgrading systems only when they break, rather then under their own terms.  Yes, this method for sure entails the least amount of risk, however vendors are likely to only feed them cookie cutter configurations of off the shelf software.  Probably not the most efficient way to enter into a new technology space and they will be beaten to this space by all their competitors who did not wait for a vendor to try and sell them something.

Technology Driven – This is the complete opposite situation of vendor driven.  In this case, the IT likely has a budget for new product introduction or otherwise has the agency to spin up prototypes and proof of concepts for new tech.  The biggest mistakes I see with these types of organizations is getting too focused on a specific technology and trying to shoehorn all their existing systems into this “next big thing.”  This wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact there is always the next new big thing right around the corner and they’re on to discovering a new tech before the organization has had a chance to upgrade to the last one.