How Business Fails Technology

With the introduction of strict regulatory requirements being imposed on most industries today, the curtains allowing corporate technology to operate in a vacuum are being drawn back to expose some interesting landscapes from which technology operates, or doesn’t in some cases, as a business.

Another reason for change is a direct result of technology’s impact to the bottom line in terms of stability and failures. Failures which occur due to bad software development or hardware failure contribute to millions, if not billions of dollars annually in lost opportunities, revenue streams and downtime of personnel unable to perform their work. A very painful example of where business suffers when technology goes wrong.

But who is to really blame? There is a term called “Time to Market” In a business environment where margins are shrinking and more competition is vying for the same customers, getting your product out the door and on the street first is the one way where you can quickly gain competitive advantage over your competition. As a result, technology is sometimes forced to do whatever it takes to get it done.

The shortcuts taken or processes skipped are sometimes viewed as acceptable risks to get to market. The view that once the short term goal is achieved, time can then be taken to go back and work to reduce the risk of stability introduced. When a technology failure occurs, IT is always accountable to the business. But in most cases, it is the business who has failed technology.

For the past 20 years the pace at which technology has evolved has been mind-boggling. Because of this evolution there has been an equally aggressive push by business to take advantage of new technology to increase the bottom line. The problem is that the speed of thought will always surpass the physical world, which is to say that technology has, in many instances, sacrificed proper design and implementation processes which take time, in order to meet an aggressive time to market as set by the business.

by Rik Jones