14 Questions To Ask Before Adopting A New Technology

 

 

How much time will this technology…Will this technology…We ask these questions and many others before adopting a new technology.

 

Read or watch to learn which questions have helped our organization.

 

Choosing the right technology for your organization doesn’t have to be a daunting task. Today we’ll share our selection process. We’ve found it simple and straightforward and that’s what’s helped us over the past thirteen years.

Organization Needs – We take an inventory (S.W.O.T. Analysis) of our organization. We look at what we do well and what we can improve. When we look at any technology, we ask ourselves the following questions:

 

  1. Will this enhance our strengths? How?

  2. Will this lessen or eliminate any of our weaknesses? How?

  3. How much time will it take to implement this technology within the needed area? Department, Division, or entire Organization

 

Let’s take a deeper dive into each of those questions.

 

First, when we look at what we do well, our strengths, we’re really evaluating how we serve our clients better. How can this new technology make the lives of our clients better? How does it create less friction? How will adopting this new software, hardware, or both allow our organization to meet clients’ needs more efficiently and effectively?

 

Next, we look at what we don’t do so well. We take good hard look at our weaknesses. Most of our data comes from our client satisfaction surveys. We’re fortunate in many aspects, one is the longevity of our relationships. The shortest engagement with a client is three years, but most of those engagement last significantly longer.  

 

When we’ve completed a task, we send out a survey. This survey has several questions geared toward feedback. Even with a perfect score, our survey includes a comments section which enables our clients to offer additional commentary not addressed in the survey. We’ve found this data invaluable. We may initiate a follow-up call to gather more feedback. Once we’ve implemented those changes, we inform our clients. 

 

If the new technology doesn’t eliminate a weakness, our organization will not adapt that technology. 

 

Lastly, we evaluate deployment. We don’t simply look at how long it’ll take for actual deployment. We look at training time, training resources, ease of use, ease of integration, and few other areas. Here are some of the questions we pose: 

 

  1. How many hours of training are needed to become proficient with this technology?

  2. Does the technology vendor/maker have an extensive training resource library?  

  3. How favorably does the vendor’s clients rate them and their offerings? 

  4. Are the training resources and/or personnel available during our operating hours? 

  5. Do they offer a risk-free, non-committal, or sample deployment? With multiple departments across several divisions, an entire organizational rollout may be too cumbersome or not entirely needed. We ask if the technology is available on a smaller scale and if we’re allowed to try it in our actual work environment? Now we can get “hands-on” with the technology, test our staffs likely adoption of the technology, and most importantly, determine whether this technology does what it promises. 

 

These are the questions we’ve used to help our organization when assessing a new technology. Adopting a new technology coupled with eight ways to increase workplace productivity could definitely boost productivity and efficiency. 

 

 

John Wright, CPA

 

 

 

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