New and emerging technologies/innovations are rapidly changing how organizations and customers operate/function. Such technologies are designed to make life easier by improving capabilities through efficiency, cost reduction, integration with the intent to produce greater business value. The challenge with businesses and organizations is recognizing the technology or solution that is going to support best. Generally the much larger organizations like Google, Apple, and Amazon will develop in-house solutions to support business strategy and goals… which makes sense, many of those large organizations are leading the way with capability development and innovation. For instances, Amazon Web Services, at its core, is a cloud technology that is providing agile capabilities and solutions to millions of small business. And because there are so many different technologies/solutions that exist, it is difficult for small business to determine the correct one that will provide the best value. This is both a good thing and bad thing, in some cases it will be tailored technology that provides specific capabilities. However, with the many options available, companies can now pick and choose various technologies to develop a modular system that best fits the organization’s needs, but also makes the extremely adaptable to future technology changes. Because technology is constantly changing, business must also constantly adapt to remain competitive and meet customer demands.

So, what are some good practices to access new technology and the potential value of their integration within existing enterprise architecture? Technology innovation leaders must stay up to date with emerging technologies to determine their impact and the opportunities they present within your organization. Ideal, leaders want to assess or analyze technology that has transformational potential and capabilities to support agile business strategies. To assess such technology, the best option is to conduct use cases or develop and test within a small mimic environment to identify its potential and assess any vulnerabilities. Adding new technology within an existing infrastructure can produce unforeseen circumstances too. Knowing how to exploit these technologies can also help leaders develop the capability to handle such unforeseen circumstances. One last practice to help evaluate emerging technology is for an organization to develop a priority matrix map with defined criteria that will help evaluate multiple solutions at once and ideally yield the best solution.

References:

Dawson, P., Davis, M., & Burke, B. (2021). Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Gartner. https://www.gartner.com/document/4004623?ref=d-linkShare