Keeping Pace

Are we "keeping pace" with evolving technology? This question must begin with an understanding of how your company gains competitive advantage. To oversimplify, most companies gain competitive advantage by doing one of the following three things extremely well - developing new products, delivering cost-effective results, or customizing delivery to meet an individual customer's need. For most firms, these three characteristics are mutually exclusive, i.e., you can't be great at more than one of them. In general, a product-development company emphasizes cycle time over cost and customization so the technologies they select should be in tune with rapid results and integration across functional lines. In contrast, cost-effective delivery firms emphasize efficiency, control cost and do not customize. Their technologies emphasize proven results, stability and high volume - often laggards on the introduction of new technology. Firms that excel by customization know each client better than the clients knows himself. Their technology is all about customization, data collection and analysis. The following questions can help you explore the relationship between your competitive advantages, the selection of technology and leadership.

Do we know how quickly each business segment needs to respond to competitive threat, to keep or to advance its competitive advantage?

Do we measure how quickly new technology or systems can be introduced?

Do we benchmark our “pace of change” against the best of breed in our industry or in any industry?  In our country or globally?

Are our change control processes adequate to ensure timely adoption and implementation of new technology or procedures?

Are our systems designers motivated to select the appropriate trade-offs between time, cost, customization and functionality so that the results match our corporate goals?

Do we understand how customers view our offerings and which dimension causes them to select us over our competition?  Is it our cost, product functionality, service, ease of use or other factor that causes them to use us or our competitors?

Do our HR policies motivate employees to accept changes in systems and procedures?

Are we selective in deciding which changes to adopt or which new technologies to implement?  Do we have a measurement process that ensures these changes enable us to achieve our corporate goals?

Do we manage the total set of change initiatives we are undertaking, as well as managing each initiative individually?

Do we communicate planned changes to our employees, customers and vendors so they can anticipate and synchronize with us?

Do we scan other industries for new technologies that may impact our business as part of our routine planning processes?

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