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Emerging technology has an ebullient relationship with the media. Stories emerge around breakthroughs, previews, trials, and potential releases. Manufacturers do their bit to stoke the flames of interest while futurists, influencers and pundits all pick up on storylines that best serve their personal or professional interests.
The point at which technology becomes ‘relevant’ is blurred. It should be the point where an organisation can tie-in a tangible outcome or measurable ROI with a product, service, or solution. But, with all the noise in the media, identifying when the technology has reached this point can be tricky.
Take AI as an example. It is without a doubt the emerging technology of the day, but it’s being applied to so many emerging products and solutions that the term ‘AI-washing’ is starting to become quite common.
The way we should be assessing the viability, relevance, and value of emerging technology (putting it to the ‘pub test’ if you like) is to assess it in relation to whether it can deliver an intelligent business outcome.
Take Apple’s new Vision Pro launch as an example. It’s one thing to buy a Vision Pro headset and enjoy a seamless view on your workspace, while chopping up veggies for your evening supper and kicking a ball around the kitchen with your kids. But is this really an intelligent way of working or living?
Technology will be taken to a new level when the AI used in wearables has the ability to integrate physical sensors, digital connectivity, and biological data analysis to monitor an individual’s health, well-being, and productivity.
Employers would then be able to leverage this information to create personalised work environments, optimise task allocation, and implement wellness programs. When technology is used this way, it can provide valuable insight to our health and well-being and suggest ways to change the way we work, boost our job satisfaction, and drive productivity.
And this isn’t about making people work harder or longer hours. It’s actually the reverse, because it’s enabling people to work smarter in an environment where productivity is enabled through supportive and collaborative physical workspaces, where technology is designed to be accessible and usable, and seamlessly integrated into the systems and workflows we rely on to do our jobs well.
Intelligent automation, of which AI and Machine Learning (ML) are integral components, already has the capability to increase productivity and improve efficiencies by automating manual, mundane, inefficient, or repeatable processes. These free employees to focus on the tasks that drive business growth and generate business value.
At an experiential level, automated systems and workflows enable people to work smarter, and to deliver customers seamless, tailored experiences. This creates more satisfied employees and more loyal customers.
These are examples of emerging technology delivering ‘Intelligent Business’ outcomes. And this is where we should be putting our focus on.
When assessing the viability of a product or service on your organisation, it’s essential to track that investment to a specific business outcome. The main strategic imperatives for organisations in 2024 are enabling agility and improving productivity, while we continue to do everything we can to drive efficiencies, improve customer satisfaction, and get more value from IT spend.
Whichever outcomes are your focus, making sure you achieve them requires knowing your current state, accurately forecasting the required future state, and identifying the technology investments needed to take to transition between the two.
A tried and testing methodology for achieving this transition is a Strategic Technology Roadmap (STR), because it enables the alignment of emerging tech with existing infrastructure. As we all know, technology doesn’t operate in siloes, but in an interconnected web of infrastructure, platforms, applications, and devices that are dependent on one another for their performance.
So, achieving this level of operational adaptability isn’t just about technology, it requires end-to-end collaboration and cooperation throughout the business, which means getting everyone in on the plan.
Budget efficacy is also important. There’s no doubt that Intelligent Business Practices, like Robotic Process Automation and Backend Integration and Automation have reached a point of maturity and relevance where they are delivering significant value to mid-market organisations.
But if the price tag attached to these technologies is in the millions of dollars, it’s going to be beyond the reach of most mid-market organisations.
It’s for this reason that Tecala has introduced its Intelligent Automation as a Service model. It allows mid-market organisations to implement automation in incremental and continuous projects, so organisations can achieve their goals within agreed timeframes and budgets.
This approach ensures a quicker return on investment, by focusing on achievable projects for which the business case is deeply compelling. It also ensures investments in emerging technology are deeply rooted in the overall ICT strategy, to ensure organisations get the business or operational outcomes they need.
Taking a collaborative and strategic approach like this also ensures all the other ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) and Data Management issues, that are crucial to putting intelligent business practices in place, are accounted for.
Because data is very much the source of insight for AI, ensure you understand how your data is going to be captured through the multiple sources in your organisation, to create a trusted source of truth. But the integrity of this source of truth will very much be dependent on the ESG policies you have in place to ensure an effective and ethical approach.
By getting the right regulation and compliance guidelines in place, you’ll be able to demonstrate to your industry – and the broader community – that you’re effectively governing data collection, storage, and usage, while emphasising privacy and consent at your points of collection.
This also extends to the cyber security framework you build around your intelligent business practices, which is the topic of our January 2023 Infosec Report.
Tecala has developed a unique methodology to ensure the adoption of technology can be collaborative, agile, and strategically led. We do this by partnering with our clients to identify technology that can deeply improve the way our clients work, and the success they experience.
Partnering with you, we enable technology to deliver long-term business transformation that continues for decades. This is how we help our clients harness emerging technology, so it actually delivers the transformative experiences and outcomes it has the potential to do.
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