Implementing New Technology
An interview with Dr. Bitthal Gujrati, Technology Partner
Q : Dr. Gujrati, in your 20 years of management and operations experience, what is one of the most common issues businesses face when attempting to implement new technologies?
A: Let me first underscore that technology implementation in itself implies changes in the way and means of doing something. It seems the desire for change is always there. One basic observation is everybody is trying to do something they think they should be doing. It has become, in fact, managing by changes rather than managing changes. The key element that is missing, or the key issue I find, is management often attempts to do something and then fails to make sure it is what was wanted. They fail to answer the key question, ‘Did the change I implemented produce the desired results?’ More often than not there is a crisis of implementation and not of the desire.
In one case, for example, the operations area of a manufacturing company complained of a quality problem. The company had dealt with the problem by adding on-line inspectors to sort the good from the bad at the end of the operation. No one ever looked at where the root cause of these discrepancies was in the production of the product.
Q: That seems pretty basic. Why do you think this issue was never addressed?
A: It is common thinking, especially in manufacturing environments, that you can’t afford production down time. It takes people who are empowered to say ‘stop the presses’ to truly find the root cause of some of these issues. But usually, everybody is in constant activity mode doing something they believe management expects them to do. Management thus gets what it works toward. If management wanted it any other way, people feel, they would have done something about it. But senior management is often too busy or removed to see issues as they arise.
Implementation is also a concern. The translation of strategic initiatives often fails to get properly implemented; and then, almost never gets checked. Organizations also fail to assure that what a product wants is what the process does to it, when attempting to bring about the It has be desired outputs. A fact, man process management thinking, I find, is lacking in most operations and managers.
Q:Are flatter organizations in a better position to handle the implementation of change initiatives?
A: Even in flattened organizations, communications are often treated as directives and not as feed-back mechanisms. Senior management sends a directive and then focuses their attention on other things. In their minds, the desired change is done once they have said it or asked for it. What doesn’t happen is the follow-up to make sure the change produced desired results. There is a world of difference in change performance from delegating versus leading it.
Q: What about implementing new technology? What are some of the challenges for businesses trying to keep up with all of the latest in their industry? How can they evaluate how successful they might be before they make a major investment of time and money?
A: Technology is neither good nor bad. How an organization plans for and goes about exploiting the new technology is the issue.
In order to evaluate whether a business is going to be successful at gaining the productivity and added efficiencies, we need to take a look at the organization’s culture. Consider, for example, what happened in prior attempts. Was the technology less than effective at remedying what it was brought in to address? Was the new technology compatible with the work culture? There is a big difference in the results when you try to implement a change by scrapping everything and starting over, leaving big gaps in skill levels and training of the end-user workforce and support infrastructure.
A common sense approach when implementing new technology is needed. Implementing a new technology or other process change takes planning, assessment, follow-up and evaluation activities to be successful. We call it the technology integration process.