Businesses- both big and small- are influenced by technology, so keeping up with the most recent and upcoming ones is essential to have and maintain a competitive edge in business. Since technology is ever-changing, it is crucial to assess all options before selecting the best-suited and most beneficial for the company. This is where technology assessment comes into play.
Technology assessment helps recognize and address the shortcomings or bottlenecks (if any) of the existing technological framework of a company/project to enhance the business's security and performance. The performance and security can also be increased by introducing or implementing newer technology.
Before technology implementation, however, comes technology assessment. Technology is vast and full of options. Selecting the right one that would be most beneficial is essential for the growth and success of the company because choosing the wrong option would result in lesser efficiency and not achieving the expected results.
When done in an orderly and structured manner, technology assessment can help get around bottlenecks and reduce risks to achieve the desired goal. However, just knowing about technology assessment isn't enough; one needs to know about the process.
Ideally, technology assessments include the following steps and phases-
1. Needs Assessment.
The first step is to have a clear understanding of the needs trying to be addressed and the expectations from a technology/solution to address those needs. Under this falls two sub-steps, namely,
1.1 Establishing Requirements:
One needs to understand the problem being addressed, the environment of the company, the needs of the customers and so on.
1.2 Market Review
After establishing the needs, one must know what the current market has to offer. There are many options the market has to offer. Still, the difference lies in the features the technologies offer and the need for it in the business.
2. Testing
Testing includes-
2.1 Procedure the Devices
This step includes making and obtaining a list of possible technology/devices that would provide with the company's needs and testing them. Having healthy relationships with merchants and vendors may prove to be helpful here to negotiate prices or loan products for the assessment tests.
2.2 Planning the Tests
Testing plans and the criteria for scoring, as well as the expectations from the technology/device, should be discussed by all members.
2.3 Testing the plan
Testing all options together under similar conditions helps understand that the technology/devices have been assessed equally.
3. Deployment and Support.
This phase focuses on making the final decision and purchasing, deploying and supporting that decision. It includes-
3.1 Selecting and buying the device/technology
This is done after weighing out the pros and cons of all dishes. The device technology is brought after settling on the best fit after the tests.
3.2 Deploying
After the purchase, it needs to be decided on how the device/technology would be delivered, set up and integrated into the business.
While diving into the business world, one needs to understand how technology and change in technology drive change in the models, projects, efficiency and ultimately the growth and success of the company.
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