Gartner delivers CIO guide to deploying emerging technology

It's tempting to be a first mover with emerging technology, but CIOs must carefully balance the risk and reward of any new technology deployment. Beyond deciding when to launch, CIOs must clearly define the business value that the emerging technology will deliver, according to Gartner Analyst Gene Alvarez.

Alvarez advises CIOs to step back from the allure of new technology and first create a risk profile to assess the feasibility of launching emerging tech. The structured approach is part of a three-step process he presented at Gartner's recent IT Symposium/Xpo.

Step 1: Identify the organizational persona

To develop an accurate risk profile for emerging tech, CIOs must first understand their organization's "persona," Alvarez said. But this is not as straightforward as one might think.

"What I find interesting about this is that you may think the organization has a certain persona, but does everyone around you share that same persona, that same concept?" he said.

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Alvarez suggested CIOs discuss organizational "personas" with colleagues to determine if they share the same view about the company's risk appetite for deploying new technologies. He defined an organization's persona as falling within three categories -- pioneers, fast followers and late adopters:

Pioneer: Have a first-mover advantage and the opportunity for high reward, but they also face high risk in being beta testers.

Fast follower: Exposed to medium risk and medium reward. They can still learn from pioneers and differentiate their organizations from competitors.

Late adopter: Often experience low risk in adopting new tech but consequently will have low reward.

Step 2: Evaluate technology use cases

Once CIOs have a solid grasp of their company's persona, they can begin evaluating use cases for a particular technology.

"We have to now balance those use cases between feasibility and business value," Alvarez said.

Alvarez explained that comparing feasibility to business value will act as an indicator of the potential for success in deploying a new technology. For example, if a CIO rates a technology as having low business value, regardless of whether the feasibility of deployment is high or low, this option would only result in "marginal gains" and therefore "not really a great place to start, because you're not going to gain a ton of money," he explained.

A technology rated as having both high business value and high feasibility is a strong place to start, he added. "So using your risk profile is how you will align the technology's timing, often using the hype cycle approach in your organization," he said, referring to Gartner's methodology for tracking a technology's maturity over time.

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Step 3: Assess organizational readiness

The next step, said Alvarez, is for CIOs to assess readiness to deploy the technology. This requires examining five areas:

Technical and financial feasibility

To determine technical feasibility, CIOs should examine if the technology will effectively address the use case in question, and if the technology has capabilities that can be applied to other use cases. That will help them assess the cost versus value of the technology and decide how much they're willing to invest in the technology.

Gartner research indicates that 83% of CEOs plan to increase investment in digital technologies by 2025. But more investment doesn't automatically equate to a higher budget, Alvarez warned.

"They're allocating more money toward bringing technology into the organization to bring business value," he said, with business value being the determining factor.

Vendor viability

When looking at vendor viability, CIOs should consider how a tech vendor is funded, how many other vendors are in that market and whether vendor consolidation is likely to occur.

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Organizational readiness

Even after examining all these categories, CIOs can hit a wall if their organization's workforce isn't likely to adopt a technology, Alvarez said, addressing the critical issue of organizational readiness.

"There are times when you're putting in technology [and employees] don't want it -- and there are ways to still drive adoption in that in that scenario," said Alvarez. "But what you want to do is make sure the organization can adapt and accept this technology. You don't want a failure just because it's rejected."

If employees are resistant to a new technology because they're unfamiliar with it, for example, reskilling the workforce would be a way to address that resistance to adoption, he explained.

External feasibility and tracking

Finally, keeping an eye on external feasibility requires watching market trends and external factors.

"There are factors that come into emerging technologies outside of your organization that you have to assess -- 'Will this technology survive in this environment as it is today?'" said Alvarez.

To help with this, creating an "emerging technology radar" chart can also assist CIOs in tracking emerging technologies in relation to their criticality to their organization. CIOs can classify emerging tech as "critical, urgent, important and watch," explained Alvarez, and track those classifications against the potential impact the tech has on the organization (low, medium or high impact). Impact, he noted, could demonstrate regulatory, ethical, social, competitive or monetary impact.

"Really, we need a clear 'what, how and when?' because it is those three questions we have to answer to determine, 'Is this the right technology at the right time, and how are we going to use it to bring back business value?'" said Alvarez.