Managing technology

Technology has spread its wings wider and continues to do so. Technology is becoming pervasive. A device like mobile phone is technology. Its utility can vary from making and receiving calls to other applications like- general positioning system, camera, music, etc. Managing technology is all about providing a good experience to the end user. The experience is incorporated by understanding how the technology works and how the end user will operate. From the end user perspective technology management is exploring and understanding the available features. An organization may have the best infrastructure and maybe even the best people, but the experience felt by the end user in using the device may be still less than acceptable. This is an indicator of the technology not managed well.

It is important to know which technology to adopt

Technology adoption depends on very many things. It is seen that technology adoption need not always be based purely how good a technology is it can be based on other influences- like personal preferences, government polices, peer pressures, etc. For example, in the US and South Korea, CDMA technology is prominent mobile technology. However in many of the Middle East nations, Latin American countries and India, GSM rules the roost. AMD is the leading microprocessor in many countries but in India, Intel is the market leader. Linux is the de-facto operating system in many government organizations across different countries of the Scandinavian belt. Microsoft Windows is the leading operating system in most countries. A proper understanding of what the technology can do is of paramount importance before for adopting, creating tools, and technologies.

Gaps between technical and marketing people

I have seen in many companies there are definite gaps between technical and marketing people. This gap makes the organization weak. Marketing department main function is to make things customer centric. It is often seen that when marketing people suggest changes in the product to the production or technical department, the technical people feel that it is not really necessary or what is asked is already existing in the product except that to get to the feature one has to go through couple of more steps (this happens mostly in software products). The reasons for this could be lack of respect for each others knowledge and priorities. This maybe rooted also because of the educational background, marketing people are from MBA background, and technical people are from engineering background. Also, could be an ego clash.

India is getting technology savvy

India has good amount of intellectual capital than many other country in the world. India is amongst the top with regard to the number of engineers and doctors in world. India has a huge population of people whose strength is in various technology sectors. India‘s software industry is growing and rated among the top 5 in the world. It is getting prepared with developments in infrastructure, new tools, and technologies to address the global needs. It needs to leverage the existing technology savvy workforce, to keep up with the momentum. Added to this India has the largest English speaking population which is the business language of the world.

Don’t overdrive technology

Technology is important and very useful. It increases productivity, cuts down costs, brings in economies of scale etc. All of this is fine. I remember a cartoon in which two people are chatting (electronic), sitting in cabins next to each other! Sounds funny, but that is the power of technology. In my opinion technology has to be used taking a good balance between the human aspects and the convenience. When I dial a customer care, I listen to all that automated voices asking me to press such and such button making me feel very uncomfortable. I am ok with this in general, but there are situations when you want to hear a human being on the other side to clearly understand my issue and provide help, instead of the recorded message repeating the same sequence. Technology should not be used as mother of all solutions.

Technology as productivity booster

The twin facts – technology helps in the development of new services and products, and its usage helps in increased productivity. Leading companies have used these two facts to their advantages. Let us take example of information technology. Information technology has replaced repetitive kind of work, which needed many people to do the same is now completely automated. Even in the areas of scientific calculations. What would take scientists days to solve math problems can be now be done in a fraction of the time. For example to do weather forecasting it would take days before the weather could be predicted and also not very accurate. Today we do this much accurately and in less time.
A large number of new ideas are generated and marketed as a result of technology. For a high-tech firm it would help face numerous challenges in terms of ever tightening development timelines, shorter market windows, evolving standards, changing technologies and severe price pressures

More and more expectation of availability and reliability

Clearly we see that when compared to the past decade the expectation of availability and reliability is ever increasing. In some sense the culture is becoming uncompromising to sluggishness.
Society expects uninterrupted service from many of the systems that it employs, such as credit card verification networks and integrated manufacturing systems. Embedded software designers are being asked more often to create systems that run reliably to the degree that they're in service 99.999 percent of the time (termed 'five-nines' availability), which is equivalent to less than one second of downtime per day.