TECHNOLOGICAL LEADERSHIP

One of the purposes of this course is to prepare you for technological leadership. Most textbooks for a course like MIS 300 don’t have that focus at all; they prepare you for technological “followership”, i.e., taking what’s dished out, approving almost anything you’re given. The philosophy is that if you know about something, it will appear less intimidating and hence more acceptable. This is clearly not a productive way to produce critical managerial thinkers.

An alternative view is to think of MIS 300 learners as potential leaders. Since everyone in the course intends to become a manager or entrepreneur (or some substitute for these), everyone taking this course also wants to lead. Leadership can be thought of in the traditional fashion as a trait or condition of causing things to happen, having an influence, making a difference, hopefully in a positive way. Technological leadership is not different. A technological leader is someone who makes something happen either in the technology (i.e., causing technology to appear or be used productively) or aided by the technology (i.e., causing things to occur using productive technology). While leading in the technology (LIT) is desirable and useful, the most effective LITs (leaders in technology) have a deep, intense, almost intuitive feel for the technology, often through specialized training. It is true that some LITs are also entrepreneurs. Bill Gates, for example, is both someone with obvious intuitive feel for technology in a technical sense, but he also is able to bring that technology to market in an effective way.

LATs (Leaders Aided by Technology), on the other hand, use technology to achieve other ends. For them, technology is a means to these ends, a tool that must be employed productively. LATs have an intuitive feel for the work they do and what it takes to meet their goals. They seek ways to meet the goals and technology, sometimes, is a way to do this. This reading is about LATs.

There are several important aspects to technological leadership from an LAT viewpoint. They are managing technology, being a good steward of technology that one has the use of. Technology assessment is the process of evaluating the value of technology for a specific set of uses. Technology forecasting is a set of methods to predict future technological advances in an application area. Technology transfer is a set of activities that a technological leader engages in to bring technology into a functional area. The technology life cycle describes typical product life cycle events for all technologies. Finally technology innovation and technology commercialization are smaller sets of activities that create technologies (or the ideas behind them) and create markets for the technologies. These are examined in some detail in this presentation.

When speaking of Information Technological leaders (LITs and LATs) come in a variety of guises. First, of course, there are the developers who actually create the tools: the programmers and systems analysts whose job it is to find out what needs to get done and translate that into tangible products involving hardware, software, networks, procedures, data and job descriptions. Technology commercializers are those people who figure out how to make money from this process. In truth, what this means is finding out what is of value and how to achieve that value. A product might be very sophisticated and entertaining, but if it has no practical value or – even worse – if it has practical value that cannot be realized either because nobody knows about it or because nobody knows how to use it properly, that product is a waste.

In a business setting, there is a class of technology stewards, individuals who are charged with realizing this value through the use of the product (system, software, application, tool). This includes everyone who is involved with bringing the product to the hands of users other than those who physically create it.

Consider the example of a firm which has asked a consulting company to build a customer information system (CIS) for its marketing department. Systems analysts and programmers who work for the consulting company are the technical people responsible for the physical creation of the product, the CIS. Consulting company management commercializes this by drawing up contracts. They may even have plans to sell later versions of this product to other customers.

Technology stewards include user management, who normally pay for the product and who command the existence of projects to build the product. In this example, this might include the VP marketing. Another important group are project managers and their clients (these are often user managers), who direct those projects as the products are being constructed. In our example, the consulting company has its own project managers, but someone from the client firm might also be brought onto the project management team. Project managers worry about day-to-day schedules, deadlines and budgets. Project managers are often technical people, but may also be user managers or even direct users.

Closely related are process managers (sometimes called “process owners”), those people who are in charge of getting work done with the product. These are often departmental supervisors. Process managers are directly responsible for the results achieved through the use of the products or tools; if the tools are used incorrectly or inappropriately, the results might be impacted; process managers are accountable. In our example, the firm’s marketing manager is the process owner or manager.

Finally, there are product owners. These are often technical people who are responsible for continued satisfactory technical performance of the product. While the consulting company might continue to own the rights to the CIS in general, the actual CIS employed by the firm “belongs” to someone. In our example, this is likely to be one or more technical people in the firm who are able to provide on-site handholding, training and technical fixes.

Both LITs and LATs view technology leadership in terms of four components; the differ in how they go about these components. These leaders can assess the value of a genre or a particular item of technology to a firm’s processes, make reasonably accurate forecasts of when the general state of technological development will reach a level at which it can be productively applied to the firm’s activities, manage aspects of the technology’s life cycle and transfer that technology throughout the organization.

In addition, A technological leader fosters technological innovation (the creation of new technologies or the discovery of new uses for existing technologies -- for example, new ways to employ the CIS for strategic advantage), and understands the technology life cycle (how technologies like the CIS appear, grow in use, decrease in value and need replacement). LITs and LATs initiate and steer commercialization of technological advances (the former into an external marketplace; the latter into the organization itself), link business and technology strategies (the former to guide technology creation; the latter to guide technology financing), manage technology R&D (LITs to create new technologies; LATs to find new uses or to motivate new understanding through research).

All technological leaders understand technological revolutions, how disruptive technologies displace existing ones and what effects they have on business. One recent technological revolution everyone knows about is the Internet. The Internet makes it possible for systems like the CIS to be used from anywhere in the world on just about any kind of computer system. Before that, advances in telecommunications made networking possible worldwide. Before that, it was the advent of the personal computer. Currently we are seeing the beginnings of a revolution in mobile computing, which might make systems like the CIS available on blackberrys or cell phones, enabling -- perhaps even requiring -- highly distributed sales organizations. Each revolution disturbs the seemingly predictable "straight line" evolution of technology and creates new opportunities, new players and new risks. Foreseeing these is difficult, but in fact having this sort of crystal-ball vision is one of the hallmarks of a technological leader.

There are four components to any technological leadership portfolio. The first two concern anticipating and evaluating technologies that might be of some use to an organization. Clearly these components require research skills and a deep understanding of an organization's needs. A critical assessment of an organization (where it is, what it can or must do, what it needs to do that) is the basic infrastructure that technological leaders begin with.

Technology assessment is a set of activities that lead to an answer to the question: “What good is this technology (for me/us/the company/our society)?” Technology assessment occurs when technologies have already been created and most profitably when they are relatively new or even untried. While it is hard to do this evaluation on technology that hasn’t even been experienced, there is great pressure to make wise investments in expensive technology. More information on technology assessment techniques is found in slides 8 and 9. A technological leader in our example would be trying to assess existing technologies, including mobile ones, as potential platforms for customer information systems.

Technology forecasting is even trickier. It’s goal is to predict what technologies are going to be available in the future and perhaps how reliable and expensive they will be. The goal is to second-guess the competition and to stay ahead of the wave as part of an overall corporate strategy. Obviously prediction is fraught with problems, but there are techniques to attempt to do so. The payoff is getting technology when it is fresh and others haven’t yet figured out (through assessment) how good it is (going to be). More detail on technology forecasting is found on slides 10 and 11. Clearly users of the CIS are likely to be on the go and forecasting the availability of appropriate mobile technologies two, five and ten years in the future would be very useful not only for creating systems like the CIS, but also for managing marketing organizations.

The next two components of technological leadership are concerned with making technology available once appropriate technologies have been designated. These are ongoing management of technology through its life cycle and expanding the possibilities of technology use within an organization.

Technology management is a complex set of activities aimed at making just the right kind of technology available in the right way at the right time at the right cost, etc. In shorthand, good technology management means developing and using appropriate technologies profitably. Knowledge of the technology life cycle and human behavior, not to mention intense domain knowledge (most IT is used in some aspect of problem solving) is critical. More detail on this is found in slides 13 and 14.

Finally, just having technology isn’t enough. Technology has to be made available to the appropriate people through technology transfer. That often means convincing people to overcome a natural resistance to change. In other circumstances, this means publicizing an application, telling others what it can do without pushing technology onto people. Finally, technology transfer might mean writing technical manuals or conducting training session. For firms that install technologies like the CIS in our example, technology transfer means assisting people in deploying the CIS productively and providing training. IT isn’t always obvious in its use. There is, by the way, another meaning to the term "technology transfer". This can refer to the movement of technology from relatively rich economies or societies into poorer ones. Technology transfer in this sense forms part of government policy of first-world nations. More detail on technology transfer in our sense can be found on slide 12.

Technology assessment, as mentioned, isn’t easy. Evaluating anything is almost always subjective and making the subjective (my personal opinion) objective (a statement most would agree with), is a hard job. Two common techniques, both sophisticated and complex, are employed in technology assessment.

Evaluation Research has the goal measuring the effectiveness of particular technologies on particular desired outcomes and rule out other causes as the source of the outcome. It is research in the sense of being an experimental technique comparing use conditions (i.e., what happens when we use the technology) with control conditions (i.e., what happens normally, when we do not have the technology). The technique is to measure baseline values and to do this measurement repeated over time. The baseline values are the “control” (pre-technology) and the later measurements are the “use conditions” (after technology). The measurements are often based on so-called “critical success factors”, measurements that mean something to the business. For example, a critical success factor for a customer information system might be repeat customers (that’s important in a marketing system). We can measure repeat customers (perhaps defined as customers who return within three months) prior to putting in the CIS and the same measurement after putting in the CIS and compare the two. If repeat customers rise, then if we were careful to have comparable situations (and this is hard!), we could attribute the rise to having the CIS. The key, of course, is having the right measure and measuring it right!!

Benchmarking is a technique taken from TQM (total quality management) and is a way to find out what criteria a system ought to meet. In the previous example, we used an indirect measure (repeat customers) that we thought a CIS ought to increase, although it’s clear we didn’t specify how this is supposed to happen. A more direct comparison is to seek out really great systems and see what they do, with the goal of having our new system do the same. It’s a bit like copying, of course. But it does tell us what to shoot for.

Benchmarking works first by looking either at the competition, where that’s possible, or similar industries, for the “best in class” in the terms we are interested in. In our example, we might look for businesses in a related industry that handle customers really well or have very loyal customers, to cite two ways of selecting “best in class.” We then visit these customers either openly (not often allowed) or surreptitiously (perhaps acting as customers or interviewing customers). Either way our goal is to determine what criteria the best in class seems to be meeting and therefore finding out what criteria our new system should meet, presumably acting in some ways like the benchmarked system.

Neither technique is easy or guaranteed to succeed. Many organizations rely on consulting firms to product assessment reports, but the danger with these is a generic result that is not particularly tailored to one’s firms needs.

Technology Forecasting is intended to predict what is coming in particular technologies. In the past, this has been very difficult, as have all techniques that try to find out the future. In practical fact we can never know the future, but perhaps if we can ferret out the main underlying trends, the future will become more predictable. Allen Tofler has been most famous for his predictions of the shape of future society. There is no shortage of individuals, pundits, consulting companies and insane maniacs who predict the future.

Most forecasting assumes straight-line projections for the future, i.e., the idea that tomorrow, while it won’t be the same as today, will not be significantly different. The philosophical basis for this idea is that change is not an inherent function of human behavior, that people take some time to try out things and that changes arise but do not happen all at once. There are many examples, of course, of sudden change, although many employ strong hindsight to say that these changes should have been predicted. Nonetheless, most predictions put this aside. One common prediction is derived from ‘s Moore’s Law, which states that the power of microcircuits is expected to double every 18 to 24 months. While this prediction has, with some major variations, generally held true since the 1970s, there is clearly some practical limit to it (but most forecasters avoid forecasting beyond ten or twenty years in any event). And catastrophic events always take place; this is one prediction that has always held true, although we don’t know when!

Two sets of techniques are available. Group-based techniques, either through focus groups (face-to-face), GSS (computer mediated), Delphi (often through mail-out questionnaires repeated over time) or panels (a standing group that repeatedly discussed the future) or scenario planning (a complex process of predicting future conditions and then future courses of action) are based on the idea that many heads must be better than one. Sets of experts (either content experts or, in some cases, consumers) “meet” somehow either face to face, using a computer, using the mail or otherwise to “discuss” and negotiate future ideas. The results are as good as the powers of individuals to predict the future and the abilities of the mediators to remind people to be polite but creative.

A variety of study-based techniques are also used. Because technology follows a life cycle (see later), it is possible to lay a “life cycle template” over to predict how a particular technology will fare in the future. Similarly, historical analyses might uncover “underlying” trends in society. Faith Popcorn has performed analyses using these sorts of techniques in her continuing “Popcorn Report” series.

Predicting the future is hard. Making it happen, however, is often a bit easier.

One important job of any technological leader is technology transfer. This means making technology available to others. Part teaching, part selling, part manipulating, part consulting, technology transfer is the hard physical act of getting technology in an appropriate form into people’s hands. For information technology, this often means finding the money to buy or develop technology, physically changing the technology to make it easier for people to use, devising procedures of use, convincing others to use it, teaching them how to use it or telling them when they’ve used it rightly or incorrectly and then moving on to find others for whom the technology is useful.

There are six kinds of technology transfer. Adaptation takes existing technology, say a packaged system, and makes it more appropriate for a specific user group (in our example, this might be tailoring the CIS to specific teams and their needs). Infusion helps members of a work group use new technology, possibly through training or by example. Dilution may be required; simplification of software through a special interface or documentation that guides users to avoid complex or error-motivating uses. Often systems, like the CIS in our example, are much more complex than needed for most purposes; highlighting what is really of value and making sure people understand that may serve a useful purpose. More sophisticated uses come later. Evolution directs changes to systems over time as business needs, user skills and technology capabilities change. Innovation is a process through which users are assisted in trying out a system in new ways and documenting successes for others. Finally commercialization in its internal sense means recovering the sunk costs of acquisition by inducing others to adopt an existing system. It may be, for instance, that the CIS might have uses outside the marketing department. Many ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems began, like the CIS, as a set of applications limited to one area. Over time, related, neighboring systems (such as production, accounting or design) find that their needs overlap with those of the core system and pressure builds to expand or generalize or export the system to these other areas. Some firms actually create commercial versions of their packages (with proprietary information removed, of course) and attempt to sell the systems outside the firm.

Technology transfer activities comprise one element of technology management. The process of technology management involves six steps.

All management processes begin with a plan, which might include assessment, forecasting and transfer. A technology management plan should be consistent with and contribute to strategic goals. Since most businesses with substantial resources rely on information technology to manage these resources, an corporate information technology management plan is often part of IT governance, a blueprint for how IT will be managed within a firm. Individuals’ IT management plans are, of course, far smaller in scope and depth, but will, indeed, contain hints of “governance.”

The next step is to research relevant and appropriate technologies. This is important because, unlike many resources, there is significant and continuous change in technology availability, capability and price. Forecasting and assessing take place during the research phase.

The third step is to obtain the relevant and appropriate technologies from those assessed to be of benefit. These technologies are either developed (in-house) or procured (bought off-the-shelf or contracted or outsourced). An essential aspect of obtaining technology is a plan for financing and physical acquisition, which might be complex and stressful, in the case of a major system involving major physical technologies or, in the case of individuals’ technology, simply the installation of an item of software on a desktop or laptop computer.

Post-implementation or post-acquisition management of a technology consists of improvement, control and disposal. Since business conditions change constantly and since experience with the technology goes along with organizational learning, there is always pressure to improve. Improvement requires monitoring of use, developing improvement strategies and continuous revisiting of the technology management plan. Improvements may take place in the technology itself (through updates), in user skills (through training) or in usage (by redefining and redirecting work or through direct managerial action).

Because technology represents sunk costs, it is important to keep these and related costs under control. Not all costs are economic; some are costs to morale or image. Technology management control means potentially commercializing the technology, perhaps additional technology transfer, planning for obsolescence (i.e., retirement or replacement), additional training and potentially even outside consulting help. Culture clashes can occur between those who use the technology and those who are militating for its replacement; this must be met with intelligent management action.

Finally, technology has a life cycle (see later slides). Astute managers can always assume that any given technology will need to be retired. Physical items have some salvage value, but software rarely has any such value and scrapping a system comes with several implicit costs such as retraining, job redesign and related periods of lowered productivity. The technology management cycle begins anew at this point.

As already stated, technology has a life cycle. Let’s consider the customer information system already used as an example. The use of the system will increase initially (there are often users even before formal launch time; these users might be doing testing or using a pilot version). During early days, users are generally highly involved in transferring their skills to the new system and scrutinize it intensely. A system like the CIS should be useful if it’s been designed well and the initial group of users grows over time until almost everyone who could use it productively is doing so. Of course not everyone will find it easy to use or useful, so there is always going to be a portion of the user population experiencing difficulties, unmotivated or even frightened by the technology. A manager who is a good technology steward will note these situations and be prepared for alternative courses of action such as training, technology improvement, job redesign or, in extreme cases, transfer of the individual.

Mature technologies – time to maturity can range from weeks to years – may be satisfactorily employed for a long time but eventually all technology grows less useful. The rule of thumb with software based systems is that they don’t wear out (become creaky with failing parts), but wear in (become less fitting to the job and less useful), although in some cases systems built for a certain level of use turn out to be less effective at higher levels of use. In these cases the technology can be considered obsolete and in need of replacement. In our example, the CIS might, after a few years, no longer be useful in handling our customers because our emphasis has changed from looking at all customers alike to customer relationships with our firm. We will then look for a different type of system, nowadays referred to as CRM – customer relationship management.

Roles of Science, Engineering and Business in Technology Commercialization (slide 16)

Another aspect of the management of technology refers less to its use than to its parentage. Information technology, like most technologies, is in a sense the child of science and engineering, in our case, computer science and computer engineering. The search for knowledge and the answers to fundamental questions naturally lead to research projects and publications in science and engineering. Technologists take these ideas and think about what can be built in terms of systems and applications. While most firms don’t really commercialize their software systems in the sense of offering them for sale to the general public, even internal IT departments must in a sense “sell” their ideas to wary users. The intersection of science and technology efforts is really a business function putting together strategy (business), discovery (science) and invention (technology). Business strategy dictates where research and development attention towards new products or processes is devoted. Information systems professionals build prototypes and create manufacturable designs (i.e., well designed systems that can be created), which are tested and refined through a production process that might include pilots up to introduction. In other words, science discovers, technology invents ways of applying these discoveries and business functions turn those inventions into useful business systems and processes

Technology Commercialization Process over Time (slide 17)

For strict commercialization, the goal is profits. Where we are dealing with an internal “market” for an internal IT department, there might not be tangible profits, but nobody wants to operate a system, let alone a department at a loss for a long time, whatever we mean by loss. Most systems which are commercialized in any sense (either sold on the open market or introduced to a set of corporate users from within) will see returns following the curves in the graph. During development, the system returns no income for the expenses. Overall profit is negative during development and may in fact remain so until some time after release. A profit will occur at some time during the post-implementation period. Remember that we might be measuring profit in non-economic terms such as number of people using a system or how satisfied they are. Before this time, there is general nervousness about whether the expenses (in general, these are real expenses in real money) are worth it. At some point, there is enough beneficial use to say that the project has “broken even” and that the commercialization process is at least successful in the sense that it hasn’t been a loss. “Sales” continue to rise, peak, level off and continue at that level for some time before individuals determine that usage is no longer beneficial (because, for example, the business situation has changed or better systems are available elsewhere which raises expectations, lowering satisfaction) and usage drops. Old systems are relatively expensive to maintain for many reasons: new users are not as proficient or capable at using the system, for example. New employees may have different training and different expectations of technology performance, having seen competing systems. For many reasons, usage and imputed profit drop. It’s time to replace the system.

Technological leadership has the same form and goals regardless of whether the technology in question belongs to a large organization or a single person, whether or not it is complex or simple, expensive or inexpensive, strategic or everyday. Those who lead in the technology (LIT) or lead aided by technology (LUT) are all attempting to find and match tools for work to be done, either others’ or their own. Technological leaders succeed because they understand what technologies of specific sorts can do for their own work or that of other people. They can anticipate, capitalize and evaluate technologies of advantage and help others do so. In this way they add value, either to those who use the technologies they provide if they are LITs or those who use the results of their work if they are LATs. The ultimate goal is to improve work activities and achieve increased value in business processes.

For most of us, this means understanding the technology that we use or are likely to use and being able to evaluate its potential for increasing the value of our own work. In a limited sense, therefore, we need to anticipate our needs, forecast likely tools, assess and evaluate likely candidates, and manage the technologies that cross our desks and desktops. Understanding that technology has a life cycle, that commercialization isn’t limited to MicroSoft and SAP, that we have a role in transferring technology from the big world of these providers to the smaller and more focused world of our own work is the first step towards technological leadership.