CENTURION, South Africa -- Innovation and the rollout of new technology remains a critical issue for any sized venture in the market today. When, where, how and why technology is embraced can have serious and lasting implications for the business.
This is the view taken by contractors and technical specialists at FOXit,an Independent Software Vendor and Microsoft-certified Gold Partner across numerous competencies within the Microsoft Partner Network.
Brett Pierce, Chief Development Officer at FOXit, says that there are companies that do battle to stay ahead of the technology curve.
“Companies that have made a five year investment into technology are not willing to make another investment within the first two years. I have not seen a major company implementing the latest technology without having done the right research,” he says.
Pierce has advice for companies wanting to make the selection and procurement of new technology the sole responsibility of project managers. “I think that project managers in major companies focus only on the technologies within their realm of projects. It is up to the programme/portfolio managers to keep an overall view of the product set across projects rather than placing the technology selection in the project manager’s hands,” he continues.
What should a company do when its technology is due for an upgrade?
According to FOXit any business looking to mitigate the risk on a new technology should start testing the new release from an alpha version all the way through to release. The rationale behind this approach is that by the time the product is stable, the pitfalls and benefits would have been identified and IT executives can make informed decisions ahead of upgrades.
“Integration and extensibility would be key, along with a defined release schedule for the next five years. There’s no point implementing the coolest Microsoft product when you’re running your entire organisation on Linux. User adoption is always a drawback and most users aren’t willing to learn an entirely new platform when they have just become comfortable with the current one,” says Pierce.
“Companies should rather keep up with the trends rather than implementing the technologies in those trends and change their release cycle to a two year period for new versions of that technology,” he adds.
In terms of integration into the Cloud, FOXit consultants suggest that businesses conduct a thorough test of the environment to check for vulnerabilities before moving to the cloud – and if the business strategy does move to the cloud, consider a solution with offline capabilities.
