As companies around the world need to increase their productivity to meet increasingly tight deadlines, implementing new technology to make your workforce more productive and more efficient is a must. Yet introducing new technology into your business operations requires several major considerations that should be assessed. Discover below some of the key steps to successful technology adoption.
Decide Whether to Adopt New Technology
The first key step in technology adoption is to decide whether to adopt it. For example, if adopting new software improves one factor at the expense of another, it may not be worth taking the plunge. This is a type of Return on Investment (ROI) analysis, which frequently focuses on financial factors. Experts strongly recommend an advanced analysis which should include non-financial factors, some of which may outweigh the financial motivation.
Always remember that your gains can come from any of the following aspects: cost reduction, competitive environment, efficiency or productivity boost, product enhancement, or faster time to market.
Minimize the Risk of Adopting or Not Adopting New Technologies
The risk of adopting new technology can be significantly reduced by developing a coherent plan and researching the positive and negative factors to be considered. Several steps can be taken to minimize the risk of adopting or not adopting new technologies and to assess the potential gains.
Organize a team to investigate the technology.
The key to this step is to choose individuals from different backgrounds who are forward-looking and open to change. The goal of this multi-functional team is to see the potential of new technology from different perspectives. Some of the results might surprise you.
Identify a business goal that the technology addresses.
It could be either a new team chat app, an IT Asset Management solution, or that shiny new cloud-based service for your sales workforce. But remember that not every new tech is designed to suit your company’s needs. In fact, new developments may actually waste your company’s time and money, without giving you much in the way of benefits. Analyze, identify, decide!
Identify the risks and document the costs.
When you analyze the implementation of a new business solution, include both the risk of adopting the new technology and the risk of not adopting it. Depending on the sphere of activity of your organization, it can be difficult to observe a clear benefit. This happens due to the weak merging between technology and benefit. Try to create a way to monitor the cost-benefit tradeoffs so that you can tell if the new technology brings any measurable gains.
Help Your Employees Adapt to the New Solution
Not every employee will adapt to new technologies at the same rate. However, if they don’t, the investment is a waste of time, money, and effort. To avoid employee frustration, delays in work processes, and daily routine disruptions, preparing your workforce for adoption is a must. Here are some important steps for preparing your workforce to adopt new tech.
Try before you buy.
After choosing the tool that holds the most value for your business, test it alongside the team leaders and other employees who are proficient with technology. Having several strong leaders working hard to develop a path for other employees to follow will help speed up the adoption process.
Training: know your audience. Training is a crucial step in adopting new tech.
When you train your employees to use new technology, always keep in mind the different types of learning. Look at your team members and their individual needs and try to find a balance between each learning style (visual learning, auditory learning, reading learning, kinesthetic learning, logical learning, solitary learning, interactive learning) for the whole and provide different paths of learning for those that need it.
Regular follow-up.
Rolling out new technology continues even after your employees have fully switched over. For this reason, evaluation is highly important.
“A final step for the successful introduction of new technology into an organization is to perform an evaluation of its performance once installed. There may be actual problems with the way the technology works, or there may be perceived problems for some users. An evaluation identifies both types of problems,” according to Bert Markgraf, writing for Chron Magazine.
Remain open to employee feedback and prove that you’re willing to act on their suggestions.
Conclusion
New technology can make an organization more effective and productive, but only if the people within the company actually find value in the new solution. The ability to plan and execute a successful organizational change is key to successful technology adoption.
