Classic Cycling
Technology adoption lifecycle
Introduction
I had an interesting week to discuss a variety of topics related to adoption technology life cycle. From Wikipedia:
Technology Adoption Life Cycle model describes the endorsement or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption through time is typically depicted as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve." The model suggests that the first group of people to use a new product called "innovators," followed by "early adopters." This is followed by early and late majority, and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "laggards."
Although all the issues described below fall into the broad category of enterprise systems, the tone and content of the conversations could not have been more diverse. These discussions highlight the relationship between disparate organizations, end users, and technology. (Side note: Interestingly enough, I had these conversations through three different methods: blog, phone and email.)
The purpose of this post is to sew these all together under a question of unification:
Who is more likely to be to the left of the curve?
To simplify things, I will put all the organizations into three categories:
- The organization is concerned
- The Organization Self-Sufficient
- The Organization of adventures
The organization is concerned
Yesterday I spoke with David Carr of Carr Communications about my book. David was the editor of reference and is now a freelance editor, writer and web designer. We talked about the challenges faced by organizations implementing new systems and why many projects do not hit their marks. I was particularly intrigued by my mention Shane's struggle with SAP Jeweler.
I also had a nice chat with Sarah Runge, author of the forthcoming book "stop blaming the Software - Profiles IT business success. "Sarah was kind enough to send a few pages focusing on challenges before executing organization:
- the difficulty of raising the overall system requirements for the discovery of the draft
- the dynamic nature of requirements
- inevitable href = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_creep"> scope creep and the resulting problems in IT projects
My conversations with Sara and David organizations dealing with issues that have plagued our customers and suppliers over the years and continue to show up for many (if not most) major projects. On the technology adoption life cycle, for obvious reasons, organizations have historically struggled with enterprise systems rarely, if ever, to the left of the curve.
The Organization Self-Sufficient
I continued to support two of my customers to upgrade from version Lawson 8-9. In previous years the implementation and future product enhancements could not be less relevant now (as in the short and medium term). Both clients are live in a few weeks and the focus is largely on what should be done to continue paying workers, financial reporting, etc. Only after that the dust settle "Improvements in the future" were addressed.
On the technology adoption life cycle, organizations of "getting by" are usually reluctant to take the lead in a new but largely untested technology. In fact, in both cases, neither the organization I really wanted to update their applications. Lawson closed the version 8 software in the near future.
The Organization of adventures
Me send e-mails with a customer of Lawson in the middle of the first implementation of the vendor's recently announced Enterprise Search. She had nothing but praise for application integration with Microsoft Office. The capacity of all things essentially google Lawson (tables, reports, fields, reports, etc) will work much easier.
Finally, I found myself in an interesting debate in the sharing of Architect Vinnie Mirchandani on whether the organizations were 2.0 ready for Web services, SOA, and other "to the left of the curve" technology. Opinions varied, but all the answers reminded me of Nelson Mandela I quote: "Where you stand depends on where you sit."
On the technology adoption life cycle, organizations with sufficient financial and human resources and a business imperative is more likely to implement a technology largely untested, especially if the seller is willing to work with the beta version of "customer" by providing resources or heavily discounted in order to promote the implementation as a successful case study. This is the case of the Lawson client search application in the enterprise.
Conclusion
The common theme of all my conversations this week is that organizations have had problems with implementation and maintenance of their systems are much less likely to be early adopters. In other words, financial resources, human and political reasons rather than the vast majority of organizations squarely in the middle of the curve. When walking is a challenge is hard to imagine running.
About the Author
With more than a decade of experience, Phil Simon assists organizations in all phases of systems consulting including vendor selection, project management, business needs analysis, gap analysis, system testing and design, end-user training, interface and custom report development, and documentation. The result: providing his clients with superior systems, increased ROI, and a healthier bottom line. Find out more about him and his company by visiting www.philsimonsystems.com.
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