Most successful organizations are committed to developing/purchasing and implementing technology that improves the productivity and effectiveness of their employees. Technology improvement is now seen as an essential component of almost every organization’s ability to compete in the market place.

However, a major flaw in most organizations’ approach to bringing in ever-improving technology is the failure to fully utilize these technologies once they have them. At my last company, we had become experts at determining and developing new very effective internal technologies on time and on budget that should have brought great productivity and employee functional improvement with only one condition: we needed to fully utilize these technologies. It wasn’t until I realized that at most we used these great technologies about 30% of their capacity that I put a stop to any new development and focused the company on achieving as close to maximum usage of the technologies.

This is a common mistake made by most organizations. It takes place when they first adopt a new technology often experiencing problems with the initial implementation requiring much more pain and work than originally anticipated. It takes place with existing systems where no one is even evaluating on an ongoing basis what the maximum usage of the technology systems would look like and are if they’re achieving it. Do you know to what level your employees use all of your internal technology systems? Do you bring in new systems because they look better than the one you have without even evaluating the potential level of improvement by just using the existing systems to their max?

At my last company we significantly improved the usage of our existing systems and thereby gained tremendous benefits by:

  1. Recognizing the need to evaluate to what degree we used each system
  2. Developing and executing an action plan to maximize the use of our key systems
  3. Having all key managers participate in the plan

Have any questions or feedback? Email me, Terry Thompson at tesh@shaw.ca

Terry Thompson, Surrey, BC, Futurpreneur Mentor

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