Why and how companies should be prepared for technology proliferation, even of the one they helped to create

No time in history before, technology is changing at the pace we are experiencing now. As the world is connected, network effect accelerates technology adoption and drives proliferation and commoditization very quickly. Once technology is everywhere, it is no longer a tool, but becomes the state of the environment that organizations operate on. Technology however is becoming embedded in our lives and therefore changes human behaviors. These fundamental shifts demand organizations not only to learn how to use technology, but to adapt to new environment and behaviors. The question therefore is not "how to use the technology", but "what my organization should be" given technology is the environment.

Let's look at a couple of examples to see how the fundamental shifts happen and change the rule of the game.

Just more than 10 years back, when doing commerce on the Internet was still very rare, most companies were trying to learn how to use it. The dotcom bubble motivated massive number of fiber optic cables to be laid, which literary commoditized the bandwidth. Enabling financial services flowering and quickly became readily available with minimal cost. Application vendors also made online transaction a standard part of their offerings, sometimes even free. For companies, the word eCommerce seems to disappear. However, companies had to go through a phase of redefining themselves given that the majority of their suppliers, customers and competitors now have the ability to do business using the net. Making it worst, many customers are getting used to it, thereby changing their purchasing behavior and refuse to do business otherwise.

Let's use government as another case. Governments within about one of two decades years back started to bring more PC into their business. The idea at the beginning was to automate their administrative works. However, as PCs and network are available at most of the citizens and organizations they are dealing with, the purpose of eGovernment changed. It's now how government should operate when parties they are dealing with are using and gradually demanding using PCs and network in their transactions. Peer pressure from governments in the same groups is another force to drive this change. Unfortunately, many didn't understand this and spent their money investing into technology without rethinking the way they organize and work. The disaster of the CP 112 program in Vietnam is one painful example of this.

The third example is different in the sense that it's about the company that created the "technology" itself. Founded in 1994, Monster.com was the first Internet job board. Since then, the company has grown to 75 million resumes on file and covers now 36 countries in the world. The new industry was so successful that it even increased the job changing wave in the United States, according to Stevenson's "The Impact of the Internet on Worker Flows" report. The concept and especially behavior changed leading to implementation of Internet recruiting solution in large companies themselves. More importantly, companies have to pay more attention to recruiting and retaining their talents to survive the new wave.

Companies' reaction however triggered a new effect, which turns back and hit Monster.com itself. Once one of starters of the whole new industry, the company is struggling with declining revenue in the traditional markets. It just announced a restructuring program and there was even a news that it would be put out for sales. Besides executive shuffling, security bleach, the addressable market seems to be reached and competition from social networking services is becoming ever fiercer. Again, when online job board is commoditized and behavior of job seekers is changing with social networking wave, even the creator of the market has to rethink the way it does business. 

How Should Organizations React

Given all the lessons learned, what organizations should do? Continuously monitoring, testing new technologies is a must. Dual technology strategy, i.e. old and new ones at the same time, is effective when technologies have not reached the tipping point. However, even before the tipping point, organizations need to start rethinking the way they organize and operate in the new environment.

The best indications of the time to adopt two-prong strategy are:

• exponential increase in adoption of technology
• technology early adopters in your organization start to refuse to use or traditional technology or publicly express their preference to new behavior consistent with the use of the new technology.

After all, affordable new technology and behavior change is the best way to tell the fundamental shift is happening. Even if you initiated one before, still keep watching, or else it would be too late.