If you look at the agenda for next week’s IT Senior Executive Forum, you’ll note that each of the presentation focuses in some way or another on technology’s continuous march towards new and emerging delivery platforms.  Technologists generally relish the opportunity to integrate new technologies and deliver new business and business process capabilities, but architects and infrastructure managers can also become fraught with headaches when trying to fit them into a technology roadmap.  Managing the communications plan, both in setting expectations for the rollout of ubiquitous devices that user communities use outside of the office and in managing the company adoption of shifts in technology, can often trip IT organizations up as well.  However hesitant you may be in approaching these processes, taking a step back to first principles and then applying simple organizational change management practices will make things more palatable and successful.

Adoption and Integration: Get Back to First Principles

The newest technologies (right now, iPhones and iPads in particular) have been receiving an additional amount of emphasis due to their widespread adoption by the user community outside of the office.  This has been putting additional pressure (from the executive to the individual contributor levels) on IT to find ways to implement solutions and applications utilizing these technologies.  However, prudent IT managers are dialing back the rush and returning to their organizational first principles, upon which all technology decisions should be made.  Questions such as the following should be addressed:

1. Does this platform offer functionality opportunities that don’t currently exist?

2. Is the excitement about the platform hype or founded in actual opportunity?

3. Can the new technology fit within existing management and security guidelines, and if not is it worth adjusting guidelines to obtain the promised benefits?

4. Is the investment founded in a sound business case or simply a response to public outcry?

In other words, the choice to adopt and integrate a technology always needs to be based on a deliberate decision-making process, not the knee jerk reaction of “we have to do this, now how can we get it done.”

Change Management is about Communication

Again, the latest technology trends are a reversal of traditional relationships.  In the past, business technology found its way into the non-work life over time, whereas now consumer products are migrating into business environments.  This makes communication an important consideration.  For the most part, change management focus needs to consider communication more than ever.  In particular:

1. End users should be kept in the loop about testing/development efforts for new technologies.

2. If the decision is made to not integrate a given technology that end users have asked for, communication needs to be proactive and frequent to manage expectations.

3. The functionality that will be released should be clearly described and delineated from typical consumer functionality. Expectations should be set early on that these platforms are being integrated for their business benefits rather than their entertainment value.

4. In general, communication should be frequent and multi-modal. This is an important concept for all IT communications, but given the frequent exposure to press about new technologies from many sources, the imperative to communicate often and in many ways is even more critical.