I am a proponent of change. Technology can give leverage to a group of people or even countries to actually stand tall together and that has not happened before. Ironically I still strongly believe a collective human decision and will for betterment. It is still the answer. Technology is not everything that we should be glorifying nor we should vilifying it. The focus is always, what is the problem here and how can we solve it? And it may involve technology or may not.
Is the cost of implementing this technology will overcome the cost of NOT implementing it?
It’s not the noble intention of having technology that we overlooked the hardworking people that rolls their sleeve and gets their hand dirty on daily basis. People, process and technology, without people the process, the technology won’t matter. In fact, technology should emphasise the importance of such work that cannot be replicate by technology. To amplify the significant value of human being, to improve work condition in a safer manner, to replace mundane and repetitive work that does not bring dignity or motivation, to shift work demands from monotonous work to automation thus shifting the need for higher skills people such as programmer and engineers. To reduce or eliminate unnecessary cost. That should be the focus.
This technology will solve a lot of problems, but NOT all problems.
We need to gauge carefully and mitigate our understanding and expectations before we glorify or even vilifying technology. There is still a lot of sceptics surrounding technology adoption and it is understood. The risk of having a non-workable technology or having a technology but without an actual ROI is always the key criticism surrounding technology. Just like any other change factor, a correct understanding on technology adoption is needed before any organisation try to pursue the transformation journey. Over-reliance on technology and technology over-adoption are among issues extensively being discuss nowadays. In facilities management (FM) industry, there has been a lot of buzz given to BIM for FM, but recent findings yet to see impactful implementation that will see a significant diffusion of BIM in FM. I hope to see better rate of adoption, but one can only hope.
Technology adoption is all about change management.
I posted an article on Technology Adoption before.
I have encountered many times in our projects, the scepticism surrounding technology due to the fact that the the stakeholders involved were not communicated properly and there were no buy in from stakeholders. The disagreement (between the group that glorifying technology or vilifying technology) and the fear (jobs replaced by automations mostly or fear of new unknown technology). The meeting sessions were mostly not productive and all over the place. Also an interesting observations for the past 2 years, we have engaged and work on projects in the northern, middle and southern of the country. The southern part of the country is quite sluggish in technology adoptions. Having being the neighbouring state of innovation hub of the world does not give the spill over effect. Our engagement for the past 2 years with almost 25 companies (thank you to our hardworking team) shows the breakdown of group as below;
- Innovator – financially strong with high risk tolerance
- Early Adopter – mostly leaders in their industry, and justifications for technology is sound and competent. Influential.
- Early Majority – followers but have deliberate willingness for change
- Late Majority – adopt when everyone does
- Laggard – last to adopt, and key decision making for technology adoption depending what happened in the past (historical)
Accepting change is difficult and adopting to new technology is hard. Unless the need is really there and all the users know what need to be done.
p/s: a lot of our work revolved around Rogers (2003), Diffusion of Innovations Theory
I write about technology adoptions, digital transformation, built-environment mostly facilities, buildings and city development. Our team is working on FOX an integrated data driven asset and maintenance management. Get in touch with us to explore.