Action Items for Extending the Radar

Action Items for Extending the Radar

With the case for extending the radar now established, here are some action items that you can take within your enterprise in order to create, extend, and operate your radar. The radar should cross the divide between business and technology and feed into the overall business strategy of the organization. It is a radar that should interoperate alongside other radars tuned to detecting customer satisfaction and loyalty, employee feedback, partner feedback, competitive intelligence, and general market dynamics.

Action Item #1: Set clear objectives and ensure buy-in for the emerging technology radar process

In creating the radar process for emerging and disruptive technologies within your enterprise, the first step is to ensure that you have executive buy-in. Executives need to understand that this process is critical for ongoing competitive advantage and even for long-term survival. Although economic pressures may push for an operational focus on sales and delivery of products and services, ignoring the radar process can place future revenues in jeopardy, slow down innovation, and can lead to missed opportunities for cost reduction and improvements in productivity, entry into new markets, and customer loyalty. It can also affect your customers' perception of your business as an innovator.

The resources allocated to the radar process can certainly vary based upon economic conditions, but the radar must be activated and be continuous in its operation. To ensure buy-in, look for prior successes and rapid techniques to deliver value. Be sure to promote success stories where your radar has detected critical technologies and has turned them into business benefits. Even the detection process can be valuable to executives. Knowing what is being picked up on the radar can show useful trends and help to steer the ship. Monthly or weekly reports to executives can give them a snapshot of current trends and impacts for their business and for the business of their customers and business partners. This can also enable cross-sell and up-sell opportunities on top of existing business.

To ensure executive buy-in, it is important to make certain that the radar is described in the correct manner. Rather than a purely technology radar, which can often be viewed as a "science fair" or experiment, it should be described as a process to detect emerging and disruptive technologies that have a strategic impact on the business. The articulation of business impact is critical here. Executives will need the translation from technical innovations to business impact. Only by conveying the business impact of these technologies will you be able to ensure buy-in for the process itself. In this regard, the translation from technical innovation to business impact should be made immediately upon detection, and the technical details should be held as background or supplementary information only.

Action Item #2: Put a business process in place to extend your current radar

Once the objectives for the radar have been set and there is buy-in from executives, you can create a business process to operate the radar. The business process can have steps and gates from one step to the next as the highest potential initiatives move through the process and others are rejected. The entire process can also dovetail in with downstream IT strategy, corporate strategy, and business development activities.

The first step in the process is the detection phase. Detection should be allowed to come from both internal and external sources. Look for ways to involve external advisors such as customers, business partners, consultants, software companies, academics, venture capitalists, analysts, and the media. The detection mechanism should include a network of trusted business advisors. Customer and business partner representation can help to ensure that the various insights and possible directions are oriented back toward the main business focus of serving the customer. In this regard, customers should often be at least 50 percent of the overall advisory board, if not more.

The benefits of a formal radar process include reduced duplication of effort, improved communications across business units and geographies, reduction of missed opportunities, early detection of key enabling technologies, and improved reuse of emerging technology throughout the organization. The business processes behind radar operation should be continually refined as you learn what output work products are most effective and which processes are most effective. A streamlined, lightweight approach is often the best starting point in order to take a quick scan of the landscape. Having multiple targets on the radar will help to ensure that the process is kept simple and efficient and that the output work products begin to take shape.

Action Item #3: Prioritize emerging and disruptive technologies in the context of your business objectives

Once the radar process has been put into action and is detecting enabling technologies, the next phase is to prioritize these opportunities based upon business impact. The final prioritization should be performed by a representative group of executives from various business units across the company, but the initial scoring can be made by one or more individuals in order to capture the first impressions. Current business objectives should be used as the lens by which opportunities are judged. A simple grading mechanism can help convey initial grades to the group for feedback and final adjustment. It is often typical to have two categories of grades, one for the general technology or solution area under investigation, such as Web services or real-time computing, and another grade at a more granular level aimed at certain initiatives or certain vendor solutions within one of the general technology categories.

It may well be that a certain vendor solution is scored highly but that the technology area is scored lower due to its emerging, immature nature and certain internal or external business hurdles that may need to be overcome prior to adoption. The timing of market entry is an important factor. Enter too early and the business may get caught up in a higher degree of risk due to incomplete standards, unreliable vendor products, or lack of industry-wide acceptance of a particular solution. Enter too late and the competitive advantage may be lost.

With the top initiatives graded, these technology areas and particular initiatives and vendors can be monitored on an ongoing basis. Those that show the most potential can be moved through the gate to the next process step. This is probably the formation of a business case around the opportunity or development of a proof-of-concept. Those solutions that are seen as attractive, but still immature, can be placed on hold for continued observation until the timing of market entry or adoption is more favorable.

Action Item #4: Look for ways to embed emerging and disruptive technologies into current initiatives

Not all of these emerging technologies form standalone solutions to enterprise challenges. As we saw in Chapter 1, many of these technologies form a new infrastructure layer that should be embedded into existing initiatives as well as be leveraged for entirely new solutions. Thus, when prioritizing these technologies, be sure to look for cost takeout opportunities and opportunities to enhance business value in current initiatives in addition to the creation of solutions to new business problems. This is important because being able to extract more value from existing investments is a key priority and can often be accomplished more rapidly than new product development or new implementation. Being able to rejuvenate existing software assets extends their longevity and thus their return on investment.

For example, one simple way to adopt Web services is to start by applying the technology for cost savings in the software development lifecycle and for enterprise application integration initiatives. Not only will this provide cost takeout from IT expenditures, it will also create a greater range of future options in the solutions that are developed or integrated due to the flexibility of software when implemented in the Web services paradigm. Web services can be applied as a wrapper around existing technology assets such as mainframes and other legacy systems. In this manner, the business can benefit from improved access to legacy data and applications without requiring a rewrite of the core business logic embedded within these applications.

As another example, wireless and mobile technologies can either be leveraged in a standalone manner for a specific enterprise function or they can be applied to enhance existing solutions as an additional channel. A standalone solution example might be a complete field force automation application delivered via PDA for workers in the utility industry. Field force automation is a prime candidate for mobile enablement since it often has a number of process inefficiencies that mobile automation can help to streamline. An embedded solution example might be the availability of order status lookup via cell phone, pager, or PDA for business customers of a major chemicals manufacturer. By enhancing the existing solution of desktop browser-based order status lookups, the emerging technology is applied to enhance an existing business process by opening up a new communications channel and level of convenience for the business customers.

Thus, in addition to applying these technologies for new solutions, be certain to apply them for enhancing existing solutions and as a strategic upgrade for your business operations and enterprise IT systems and processes. On the IT side, this upgrade can include application development, deployment and management techniques, enterprise IT architecture, best practices and standards, and enterprise security. On the business side, the upgrade can be applied to almost any existing initiatives that have business processes transacted via software.

Action Item #5: Combine emerging and disruptive technologies holistically

The new waves of emerging technologies are highly synergistic with one another. Many of them are enabling technologies that apply at the infrastructure level as fundamental building blocks for business applications to be constructed upon. The much sought-after "killer application" is probably not a single application or a single technology enabler such as Web services or RFID, but a holistic combination of enablers. Just as silos have historically been created in Internet, intranet and extranet applications, or in various packaged applications, silos can just as easily be created from emerging technology. The challenge for the business is to unlock the right combinations of these enabling technologies that will yield the maximum business benefit.

A holistic approach that views these enablers in terms of their potential impact and value for employees, customers, and suppliers will yield the best results. As an example, Web services and peer services can be applied both internally and externally. Mobile business can likewise be applied for employee productivity or for improved customer and supplier interaction and responsiveness. When wireless applications are combined with real-time computing initiatives, location-based services, and RFID technologies, the business possibilities and the range of opportunities become far greater. One of the key questions to ask is how business objectives such as increased agility and productivity can be generated by the addition of these technologies. How can greater value be extracted by making information and transactions more fluid? How can the intelligence and reaction time of the business be improved by moving to more interoperable, real-time, resource-efficient, flexible, and secure systems? Be aware, however, that these enablers are not a magic bullet. There may still be considerable heavy lifting to be done in terms of application development, integration, and process change. The good news is that the tools for performing the work are improving and the newly constructed artifact will have vastly improved capabilities from the previous generation of e-business applications.

One of the legacies of the e-business explosion in the late 1990s was the large increase in the number of categories of enterprise software and an even bigger increase in the number of software companies. There is now an alphabet soup of acronyms that describe different categories of software solution from which to choose. One result of this wide array of new categories is that enterprise decision makers often consider each one in a vacuum. A business may embark on a Web services initiative, a peer-to-peer initiative, or a mobile business initiative and see them as wholly separate ventures.

By looking at the broader context of these technologies, their characteristics, and how they can be exploited, businesses can find ways to combine initiatives and achieve synergies. The challenge for the innovative enterprise is to look beyond individual software categories, as defined by the software companies or the analysts, and apply them in combination to respond to business challenges.

The following three scenarios may help to illustrate how the technologies can be combined:

         A human resources department decides to cut costs by automating enrollment procedures for medical, dental, and eye-care plans. To achieve this, it uses Web services software to aggregate services from various benefit providers and create a common interface for staff; business process management techniques to help design and execute the required business processes for each provider during enrollment; and peer services, for person-to-person communication, to enable IT departments to collaborate during implementation of the system and to help benefits departments service employees afterwards.

         A manufacturing equipment vendor incorporates an embedded system in its customers' machinery. The system continuously transmits performance information to the vendor's headquarters; when a potential fault is detected, the vendor sends a message to a field service worker's smartphone or PDA, prompting the worker to inspect the equipment. The vendor can thus fix potential equipment problems before they disrupt its customers' business.

         Within the supply chain, information on the quality of goods received at a warehouse is recorded on a PDA with wireless connectivity. The results are transmitted to a real-time system, coupled with Web services integration to partner systems, in order to manage vendor quality. The real-time nature of the information flow helps reduce cycle times and increase productivity compared with more traditional batch-orientated processes. Information captured electronically at the point of activity also eliminates the need for duplicate data entry in the back office, hence improving data accuracy.

Over the past decade, the technical challenge for businesses has been to implement large packaged software applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and supply chain management systems. The challenge over the next decade will be to implement the next generation of software in a manner that is category-agnostic. In other words, how enterprises exploit the business and technical linkages and overlaps between software categories and components will be more critical than the functions of the components themselves. As enterprises become more virtual and more business functions are outsourced, the raw elements of speed and flexibility and the level of collaboration between software components will be key factors in creating a competitive advantage.

To exploit all these technologies fully, the business must take a holistic view and be prepared to incorporate as many technologies as are required by its objectives. The lesson from the e-business era is that even emerging technologies can create silos of functionality within a business. Just as Internet, intranet, and extranet functional silos were combined several years ago, so the next generation of information technology advances should be combined during the planning stage rather than as an afterthought. This approach will help maximize the achievement of business objectives and minimize the number of islands of automation. One of the challenges will be that the holistic view will probably cross several vendor products. Making these products all work together will be an integration challenge, but one that will create higher levels of competitive advantage rather than simply implementing prepackaged solutions.

When taking the holistic approach, it is also important to look not just at software innovations but also at developments in the hardware and networking side as well. Chapter 9, describes some of the new innovations in this space, including grid computing, computing on demand, personal mobile gateways, and fuel cells.

If we look at the core attributes of these seemingly disparate software categories discussed in the previous chapters, we find that they are, in fact, intricately related. The technologies deal with advances in machine-to-machine integration and standardization, person-to-person collaboration, the speed of information flow, flexibility of process, and mobility. All these characteristics need to be embedded in the next generation of business processes, transactions, and interactions as fundamental building blocks for a new business architecture. What's promising is that these advances also indicate that we are starting to shape technology around ourselves and our business processes instead of shaping ourselves around technology. The new business architecture brought about by this new wave of enabling technologies will help to create a digital business operating system that can enable both time-based and capabilities-based competitive advantage.

Action Item #6: Apply emerging technologies to operate the radar itself

Emerging technologies can be applied to operate the radar itself. In addition to the typical use of electronic spreadsheets and documents, a collaborative hub can be used to serve as an ongoing knowledge base accessible by both internal executives and external advisors. As corporations increasingly focus on external as well as internal inputs for detecting emerging trends, an enterprise portal can help serve as a hub for the knowledge management and collaborative aspects of the radar process. For example, information and documents from outside advisors can be posted on the portal and competitive intelligence documents can also be uploaded.

There are several opportunities available when looking to emerging technologies to help operate the radar. Peer services, or peer-to-peer, can be applied for the collaborative aspects of the knowledge portal for functions such as instant messaging, chat rooms and whiteboards. Web services can be applied in order to automate the integration of data feeds from news sites and to capture competitive intelligence in real time. Business process management tools can be applied to help manage the process of moving detected technologies from theory to practice with the relevant approval steps and workflow among decision makers. Mobile business technologies can be applied to serve as an executive dashboard into the radar, highlighting key metrics and information.

Using emerging technologies to operate the radar has another advantage as well. It can help to evangelize these new techniques and serve as a valuable demonstration of their capabilities. Many of the executives who are exposed to the internal radar operation in terms of decision making on future investments may have limited time to explore the actual details picked up by the radar. Having material presented to them using the most promising technologies under investigation can help to put some of the theory into practice.

Action Item #7: Continually monitor and adjust your emerging technology radar process

The final action item is to ensure that the radar is kept in constant operation and is continually adjusted. It is important to set up the network of input sources from both IT staff and business executives. New solutions may come to light from either of these sources and monitoring both business and IT developments can help to ensure that the radar is scanning all areas of opportunity.

Analyst reports and predictions for emerging technologies can help to indicate certain possibilities, but they must then be filtered for your specific business needs and industry segment in order to gauge applicability. Requirements driven by customers and business partners are even better since they will help to drive development of the right strategic capabilities. Once the radar process is in place, one of the benefits is that its operation can be scaled up or down, in terms of investment and level of ongoing effort, as needed, based upon business constraints. Continual monitoring and adjustment of the radar process become a small percentage of the effort once the initial process and procedures have been defined.

 



Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology. Harnessing the Power of Breakthrough Technology. for Competitive Advantage
Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology: Harnessing the Power of Breakthrough Technology ...for Competitive Advantage
ISBN: 0130473979
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 81

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net