Attempting to follow in the strategic footsteps of Innovators does not necessarily entail an abandonment of existing priorities. Their elevated tech success and disruption readiness is due to a focus on implementation optimization and the technology support ecosystem rather than the technology prioritization itself.
In line with all segments, Innovators rank the financial impact that past technology deployments have had on their organization as the single most critical factor to its success (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Ranking of Past Deployment Success Factors by Tech Adoption Segment
This is not surprising – financial gain is a universal priority and measure of success for any enterprise project, tech-based or otherwise. What is noteworthy is the disparity between segments on the importance of technological maturity, the ability of internal IT teams to provide support and the importance of a comprehensive pilot phase.
These implementation attributes rank much more strongly for Innovators and reaffirm their advantageous approach to tech adoption shown earlier in Figure 3, which outlines their top tech selection criteria including:
Early and Mainstream Adopters instead select their solutions based primarily on business impact, cost and security vulnerabilities. These are all immensely important factors, but they cease to matter if a technology investment is poorly deployed, optimized and supported ̶̶ if it is not usable. Moreover, this mindset drives organizational behavior that initially attempts to disprove the value of a potential investment (e.g. Is it too expensive? Is it not secure?). Additionally, as evident in Figure 7, Innovators put emphasis on testing end user adoption, IT support capabilities and a technology’s maturity through the implementation of comprehensive pilot programs. This correlates to Innovators’ heavier use of partnerships, as a thorough pilot phase is typical of a deployment launched with the guidance of an effective tech partner.
To successfully introduce new technologies into a business, both adequate IT capacity and end user ease-of-use are of critical importance, and both are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. In an interview for this research, an IT Network Infrastructure & Operations Manager for a building materials manufacturer admits that, presently, “a lack of internal expertise is the main barrier that prevents full optimization” of their organization’s deployments. This is a crucial point regarding the growing importance of outsourced partnerships that can help manage the burden of expanding mobile fleets as well as ensure the intuitiveness of advancing solutions.
