TECHNOLOGY DELIVERY

In our lifetime, technology has changed every aspect of modern life, from medical technologies that enable paralysis victims to walk again, to the way children (and adults) learn, to the way packages will soon be delivered to your door via drone.  Indeed, society has become dependent on complex technology control for such basic functions as energy delivery and transportation.  It's difficult to imagine the world without technology - just consider being without your cell phone for a single day.

In the workplace, the advancement of technology often outpaces the ability of business to keep up.  Organizations are forced to maintain current technology for to enhance operational efficiency or to gain a competitive edge.  Yet technology projects are some of the riskiest investments for an organization to undertake, with nearly two-thirds of technology initiatives failing altogether, or reaching only modest levels of enhanced performance.

The landscape of business history is littered with examples of companies that have suffered tremendous losses, including buyout or bankruptcy, in pursuit of failed technology initiatives. 

So why are technology-based programs so challenging to successfully implement, especially given that the newly deployed technology is brought on-board to introduce fresh capability gains?  Common reasons include the typical fuzzy suspects: fuzzy vision, fuzzy stakeholder involvement, fuzzy requirements, fuzzy scope definition, fuzzy communications, fuzzy integration.

At the core is the predominant harbinger of technology implementation failure: the disintegration of current business process under the refreshed technology, and the inability to rapidly adapt critical workflows to the new system.  The resultant process gap, loss of productivity, and additional expenditures can be expensive, and in some cases, too much for the organization to overcome - implementation costs are usually many millions of dollars over several years for complex enterprise-wide IT systems.  And that's before the system goes live.  And that's if all goes according to plan.

Before embarking on any enterprise-wide technology it's important to understand the inherent risk of failure that goes hand-in-hand with the opportunity of success.  Start by answering the question "why are we doing this?" to develop a cogent vision of success.  Consider building a business process catalog if you don't already have one, or updating your current catalog.  Understanding how the processes interact and impact various resource centers will ensure that the appropriate stakeholders are involved early, and enable full requirements discovery.  Focusing on the business process pattern also identifies integration points between data sets, systems, and workflows.

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