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.

Connectivity the challenge for the future

As we seek to find increased the gains by factor times by interconnecting various components doing specialized work, the challenges we encounter in terms of two components talking to each other becomes non-trivial. Further, the complexity of interconnection increases as we move from connecting homogeneous components and further to heterogeneous components.
Increased connectivity is presenting a challenge across all sectors, whether this is in medical systems with issues of legacy interfaces and centralized patient records, the need to connect a camera to a personal computer via a home network or the high availability required of an integrated manufacturing network that may span the world.

Challenges of embedded software development

Embedded software design and development practices need to be as good as they can be, because the competitive playing field is often so even and so fiercely contested. Software bugs are now both the biggest and fastest growing source for claims against warranties, and costs are spiraling. Warranty claims also affect perceptions about brand quality that eventually leads to an erosion of profits and market share.

Is technical innovation as competence enhancing and / or competence destroying?

At the beginning of the s-curve, the technology is new and untried. As we progress in time and with application of effort the technology gains in performance at an increasing rate. At a certain point the curve starts to slow down, as the technology matures. Growth and innovation slows, and level-off as the curve reaches the performance limitations imposed by external factors.

The implications of s-curves are clear; continuing to ride on a technology wave when a new s-curve is starting will render obsolete the company’s technological foundations. Hence, the waves of technical innovation may deposit new possibilities to be combined into current and future products- or they may wash away the technical foundations of the company. Thus technical innovations are competence enhancing and / or competence-destroying.

Technology as change enabler

Technology has been in the forefront of change during the last several decades, bringing new products transforming our way of life and changing the rules of the marketplace. The reason for the increased attention to the management of technology is the fact that technology accounts for a large share of the productivity gains in terms of innovation in high-tech firms during this century. As a consequence, the role of Chief Technology Officer and technology management functions within many firms has assumed greater importance in the conduct of many corporations.

Technology as wealth creator

Technology generates wealth when it is commercialized or used to achieve a desired strategic or operational objective for an organization. When we say technology can be used as a wealth creator, it means more than just money. It encompasses factors such as enhancement of knowledge, intellectual property, effective exploitation of resources, preservation of the natural environment, and other factors that may contribute to raising the standard of living and quality of living. The technologies that exist in a business are the technological assets of that business. These assets may therefore include hardware, software, brainware and know-how. They constitute the collective knowledge and technical capabilities of the organization including its people, equipment and systems.