Key Steps to Implementing New Technology Within a Company

Digital technologies are the future of businesses, yet implementing them doesn’t often go as smoothly as imagined. Here are the key steps you need to take to ensure your company implements new technology more smoothly.

A staggering 70% of companies in the United States have a digital transformation strategy in place. The drivers for digital transformation and implementing the associated technology usually relate to improving business processes and being more competitive in the marketplace. While digital transformation is a term given to companies who need to overhaul their approach to digital to meet modern standards, the implementation of technology is never truly complete. Technology is evolving and improving all the time, which means any digital transformation strategy needs to incorporate an ongoing plan for the continual implementation of technology.

In reality, many employees become frustrated by the implementation process of new technologies in an organization. The actual usage of new technology can be patchy due to poor buy-in or lack of training, and an inability of new technologies to work seamlessly with existing technology sometimes means internal processes do not improve at all.

However, we all know that technology is the future, and has the ability to tremendously help businesses if it’s done right. So how do you change the way technology is implemented in your organization for the better?

Choose The Right Technology

New software and digital systems often fail because they are not quite the right technologies a company needs. Even if it takes time, it is crucial that you go through a rigorous process of selecting the best technology for a particular problem or process. Many companies at the moment are focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics, referred to as Machine Learning Operations (or MLops). As these technologies are now becoming mainstream with nuanced abilities, technologies such as MLops can solve multiple problems for a business and handle large datasets.

Indeed, focusing on choosing technology that solves more than one thing for a business means buy-in and implementation are going to improve drastically. In order to identify the right technology, extensive spreadsheets and checklists of functionalities can help to compare technology offered by competing providers. Include everything from the problems you wish to solve to all the existing technology your organization uses, and whether or not these new technologies could integrate.

Create An Internal Implementation Team

The integration of technology is usually left to one person, or perhaps a handful of people from the IT department for larger projects. However, for successful technology implementation, there really needs to be a team of people championing the technology across the organization. These are people who can be involved with the technology as it is developed and implemented, sharing knowledge with their teams about progress. This is always a great way to gain more buy-in from people across the company. When it comes to training, these individuals should be trained as super-users too, making them go-to people for advice when the technology is rolled out to colleagues across the business.

Implement In One Team First

Before giving everyone across a business access to a new technology, it is usually a better idea to launch the technology to one team first. This team should be chosen carefully – as they should be a team to whom the technology could make a big difference, and a team who has shown a level of buy-in to the process. There are usually bugs and issues in any new technology to start with, so you want to trial it with a group of people who won’t be put off by this. The idea is that these people will in turn become a group of champions for the technology. Once you have completed a successful trial of the technology with a team like this – and resolved any bugs and issues – consider using this team for some internal marketing too. Intranet articles, a speaking spot at a company conference, or another form of internal communications will all help with buy in.

Train And Launch

Giving staff members adequate training in a new technology is crucial to its success. Some technologies are more user friendly than others, and all people learn in different ways, so it is critical to provide the right amount of training to cater to all variables. In-person or live training is one way training should be delivered, but you should also provide options for people to learn in different ways. Short video how-to guides that can be accessed any time are very important. You should also give people who find new technology more difficult a way of discretely asking for additional help. Lunchtime brush-up sessions or one-to-one guided video calls to complete a specific task can work well for this. Ideally, training should be delivered to everyone within a very short time period of a technology being launched for maximum success.