Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

UNIT 4
TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY AND COMPETITIVENESS

4.1. Introduction:
• Strategy is a plan or framework that is designed to achieve the organizational goal.
• Technology Strategy is the overall plan or framework designed by including
company's principles, tactics etc to achieve the company’s goal.
• Strategy Management is the continuous planning, monitoring, analysis and
assessment of all that is necessary for an organization to meet its goals and objectives.
• The strategic management process involves analyzing cross-functional business
decisions prior to implementing them. Strategic management typically involves:
✓ Analyzing internal and external strengths and weaknesses.
✓ Formulating action plans.
✓ Executing action plans

Two approach of technology strategy:

Two Approaches to Technology Strategy
• Introducing innovative technology: Finding the newest technology that fits the
organization.
• Fullest exploitation of the company's existing technology through
✓ finding new applications of technology
✓ Integrating different technologies
✓ establishing effective linkages between separate tasks in developing new product
technology
✓ transferring technology between different units within the company
✓ licensing out
✓ joint ventures
The role of management in building competitive advantage for an organisation, depends on the
technology strategy.

4.2. Accessible Technology:

• Accessible technology, also commonly referred to as assistive technology, are the
technology and systems that are designed or developed to assist the people or
technology with disabilities.
• Example Magnifying Softwares or glasses, Voice recognition system etc.
• Accessible Technology strategy defines how the technology fits within the
organisation.
• Accessible technology, also commonly referred to as assistive technology, is the idea
of creating or implementing technology and systems that cater to employees with
disabilities.

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 Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

Elements of accessible technology:

• Vision statement: This involves the creation of a unique statement that defines the
role of accessible technology in the organisation and how it supports the organisation’s
overall vision of accessible technology objectives. We have to restate the accessible
technology vision, if the organisational vision already provides the foundation for
creating accessible objectives.

• Objectives: The objectives define the success metrics and clarify the details of vision
statement. The objectives use the vision of the accessible technology.

• Expenses and budget: This involve the clarification that is done in regard to the
expenses, and describes the funding resources. This explains which expenses should
become a part of overall technology purchase, and which should come under a separate
budget. Some organisations include the assistive technology product costs in the main
centralised accommodation budget, and some companies deduct these expenses from
the individual technology budgets of each department. It is important for us to clarify
the budget decisions and see that the funds are allocated appropriately

• Ownership: The ownership defines the responsibilities of the team members in the
project. The ownership also plans the execution of the project. There should be one
committee to see whether the execution of the plan is moving correctly or not

4.3 Innovation Management:

Definition of Innovation: The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or
service that creates value or for which customers will pay.
• To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must
satisfy a specific need.
• Innovation involves deliberate application of information, imagination and initiative in
deriving greater or different values from resources, and includes all processes by which
new ideas are generated and converted into useful products.
• The innovation involves all the managers from different departments.

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 Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

• The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value
or for which customers will pay is knows as Innovation.
• ‘innovation management’ is defined as the systematic processes that help the
organisations in developing new and improved products, services and business
processes.

4.4 Competitive Advantage:

• A competitive advantage is an advantage over competitors gained by offering
consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater
benefits and service that justifies higher prices.
• Porter suggested four "generic" business strategies that could be adopted in order to
gain competitive advantage.
Michael Porter divided competitive strategy in four different types of strategies.
• Cost Leadership Strategy: Cost leadership strategy is difficult to implement for
small scale businesses as it involves making long term commitment for offering
products and services at lower prices in the market. For this purpose, firms need to
produce products at low cost otherwise it will not make profit. Since the cost leadership
means to become low-cost producer or provider in the industry, any large-scale
business which can provide and manufacture products at low cost by attaining
economies of scale. There are many costs leadership factors such efficient operation,
large distribution channels, technological advancement and bargaining power. Here
Walmart is a good example.

• Differentiation Leadership Strategy: Identifying attribute of a product which are

unique from competitors in the industry is the driving factor in the differentiation
leadership strategy. When a product is able to differentiate itself from other similar
products or services in the market through superior brand quality and value-added
features it will be able to charge premium prices to cover the high cost. There are few
business examples who successfully differentiated their brands e.g. Apple, Clif Bar
and Company, Ben & Jerry’s and T Mobiles.

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Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

• Cost Focus Strategy: This strategy is quite a resemblance to the cost leadership
strategy; however, a major difference is that the cost focus strategy businesses target a
particular segment within the market and that segment is offered the lowest price of
the product or service. This type of strategy is very useful to satisfy your consumer and
increase brand awareness. For example, beverage companies manufacturing mineral
water can target market segment like Dubai, where people need and use only mineral
water for drinking, can be sold at a lower than competitors.

• Differentiation Focus Strategy: Similar to the cost focus strategy, differentiation

focus strategy targets a particular segment within the market; however, instead of
offering lower prices to consumer; firms differentiate itself from its competitors.
Differentiation strategy offers unique features and attributes to appeal its target
segment. For example, Breezes Resorts, is a company having several resorts and caters
only couple having no children and offer peaceful environment without any children
disruption.

4.5 Selection of a New Technology

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 Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

4.6 Implementation of New Technology:

• We know that planning is the key to success of a project. In the same manner, a sound
planning is essential for the success of any technology’s implementation.
These vital preliminary considerations are:
• Initial considerations: The management of the business needs to understand that the new
system alone cannot find solutions to all the problems experience by the organisation. The
whole implementation process involves the complete business process and/or academic
practice, consumer services, communication with suppliers and a relationship among all other
engrossed stakeholders. There are a number of less-substantial activities, which are critical and
people those are involved must: -
✓ Have an understanding of the organisation predominantly, in terms of its traditions and
principles are essential.
✓ The underlying principle of any new system implementation should be able to provide
all the better services to all concerned through it.
✓ This information has to be conversed to all concerned parties.
✓ A complete review of every business processes and, where required, academic
practice, and developing and introducing new policies before tuning the system to meet
the decided requirements should be undertaken.
✓ The complete approval of the difficulty and flexibility of the system should be
determined.
✓ The inbuilt dangers of customisation of any software should be understood.
✓ A thorough system test procedures should be conducted, while accepting the likely
need for software malfunction and improvements.
✓ The training and development to be conducted for the internal staff should be planned
in advance.
✓ The users must be trained, to use the system.
✓ The essential nature of system documents has to be accepted and retain accordingly.

• Planning and implementation: A thorough plan with efficient management is

necessary for success, and to work against the fear of high costs, extended time, losing
key persons and common disappointment with the result·

• Go-Live Considerations: Finally, it is essential that the “go live” day causes as tiny
disturbance to the daily business, since it is practically possible. The various issues
arising at this point of time will negatively affect the organisation’s status, sometimes
irreversibly, with all stakeholders.

Considerations for implementation: As we are discussing about the implementation of

technology, we will now briefly discuss about some considerations for implementation of
technology.
✓ Be aggressive: An important consideration when implementing a new technology is to
be aggressive to set up a strong competitive edge. The competitive edge enhances
production that may be related to the total system performance and authorising
employees. A competitive edge will make the clients and customers more independent.
For example, we can think of an ATM machine that will make the customers convenient
by establishing it outside the bank. The competitive benefit may possibly combine
several functions, partners, or flow of data that will lead to a effective business.

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Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

✓ Be cautious: If the new chosen technology provides revenue to your business, then it
is necessary to be careful while making any major modifications in the new technology.
Being cautious does not merely mean that you should avoid the advancing technology.
It conveys to be more careful in understanding the consequences and secondary
applications which may perhaps be impacted as a result of a very small change. If we
consider examples, of some companies that had apparently made changes to billing,
failed to produce invoices or statements to the clients. The consequence formed
economic poverty for the billing company, and for the displeased customers, who
abruptly received several months’ worth of amass billing once the accounting system
problem was resolved. In addition to the impact on cash flow, the relationships with the
customers become weak. Henceforth, you should be aggressive to increase the
competitive chances to grow the profit and performance of your business. At the same
time, you must be careful even while implementing changes that may affect your core
business contributions, customers, or billing.

✓ Be quick: It is important for you to be quick enough to implement the small changes to
your chosen technology and to supervise their impact. There should not be any delay,
when it comes to performance improvement, internal proposal for simplifying routines
or improving customer performance. We must follow a set of routines, to design small
changes, test changes and schedule to bring consistent enhancements. It is pretty often;
the minor improvements encompass the major impact to business performance.

✓ Be slow: If major changes affect your business, it is vital to make the implementation
changes slowly. Normally, the centre design and functions of the business are well-
organised and updated. The processes that are more frequently in use are likely to get
the majority attention and seem to be highly evolved. Basically, these processes are
given the first priority, when it comes to implementing a transfer in technology. On the
other side, you must avoid focusing on common ground, also conserve the primary
processes until the changes have been tested on some of the more difficult and less used
utilities. There will be remarkable information to be achieved with the experience and
less effect on business by concentrating on most composite and least used functions. O

✓ Be safe: During the implementation of a new technology, the better time to address the
potential security needs is at the time of design and development. It is better to employ
a security expert who will take care of the privacy of the organisation. If you have
customers, credit cards, customer accounts, customer information, intellectual
belongings, monetary information, health information, or employee information stored
automatically, available on a network, or printed in files, then it is vital to consider
safety. Also, if you are planning to undergo a technology change, it is the right time to
reassess the associated documents by means of a security or privacy specialist.

4.7. Technology Management Evaluation or Assessment:

• Technology assessment (TA) attempts to anticipate future development of technologies
and projects and their possible impacts, and feedback the assessments to relevant
decision arenas.
• TA is a form of policy research that examines short- and long-term consequences (for
example, societal, economic, ethical, legal) of the application of technology.

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 Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

How to Conduct a Technology Assessment

Step 1: Discovery
• The first step towards picking the right technology is discovery.
• The purpose of the discovery phase is to deeply understand your existing reality, the
problem you’re solving, and who you’re solving it for.
✓ Understanding your current technology eco-system
▪ You need to discover your current technology environment.
▪ This includes both the solutions you’re currently using as well as the systems
and processes used to connect those systems.
▪ A good way to look at this is to look at it through the lens of a business process,
and looking at what data is moved along the way, where that data is stored /
what’s the source of truth, and how it gets from point A to point B.
✓ Understanding the problem
▪ Next, you need to understand the problem, both in terms of the business and in
terms of your end-user experience.
▪ For example, say you are a sales organization struggling to hit your targets. Your
business problem might be that you are not generating enough new business,
and you are not sure why, what to do about it, or where to improve. In the same
instance, your end-user problem might be that they don’t know what works and
what doesn’t, so your sales reps just guess.
✓ Understanding your people
▪ Finally, you need to understand your people.
▪ That end-user insight isn’t going to come unless you take the time to really
understand what your end users are struggling with and link this back to the
high-level business problem. Shadowing of how people do their jobs,
reviewing the existing usage data, user interviews, and rapid prototype testing
are all excellent ways to uncover this information.

Step 2: Analysis
• By the end of the discovery stage, you should be armed with information about where
you are now and where you want to go. Ideally, you’ll have the beginnings of
requirements to get there.
• Next, you need to analyze the precise functionality that you have internally and how
it’s currently being applied.
• Since you have a good understanding of the problem, the goal, and the environment
and systems, a good place to start is to look at what your existing tech stack can do.
• You need to look at how the technology is being applied at a granular level.

Step 3: Define & Develop

• Next comes to define and develop. You have a high-level business goal and a good
understanding of the problem, environment, and the holes you’re trying to plug.
• Next, you need to build out your vision for the end state. It’s not just about what
problem you’re looking to solve, but more granular; what is your technology solution
going to do/drive the business forward?

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 Lecturer Notes of Management of Technology Department of BBA

Step 4: Document
• The final step is to put all your work down on paper in a well-documents plan.
Your final document should include:
• A high-level overview,
• A crisp explanation of what you are solving and what you are asking for
• All the details of the implementation and deployment
• Details on project timelines and ownership.

4.8. Automation and Automation Technology:

• Automation is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver
goods and services with minimal human intervention.
• Automation technology comprises all processes and work equipment that enable
technology to run automatically.
• The automation decisions act like legal support systems that instantaneously solve and
offer solutions to the recurring organisation problems.
• For the purpose of operational decision making, a rules-engine is used.
• The engine employs actionable analytics and business rules to make and deliver adapted
alert. In addition, it relates the business intelligence to business users or to create and
deliver action messages for processing by operational applications.
• To handle a particular business situation, it produces alerts and messages which might
contain the announcement, warnings and suggested solution to solve a problem.
• A rule engine can also be invoked by a user in real time to assist in business decisions,
whether to fund a loan to the client or in providing credit cards, or to calculate the risk
occurred in a particular business transaction.

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