Technology, innovation and the human factor

There are a number of goalposts that an organization must pay attention to as it paves its way to a dominant position in a competitive world: identifying what its key activities comprise, how it can maximize its performance and how technologically innovative it is and the tools, such as information systems, that it uses. How do all these affect planning, implementing strategic steps and managing strategic changes throughout the life of the organization?

Business competition in the global market means economic, technological, organizational and managerial competition that takes into account environmental factors, level of risk and level of uncertainty. An organization’s technological edge directly affects its organizational and managerial competitiveness and in turn its economic performance.
Organizations need to look at how innovation and technology affect their overall strategy and increase their profit; they need to understand how technology affects their efficiency, their managers and their business positioning as a whole in comparison with veteran players in their target market. Are these companies successfully using innovation and technology to improve their business-specific processes and achieve their strategic goals more easily? How can we tell?

It is important that organizations be aware of the role that their human capital plays and the level of cooperation needed in adopting the technological changes necessary for positioning the organization in a competitive world. They must ask how their human resources affect the strategic decisions being made. Technology and innovation in a company require the mobilization of human capital in order to adopt smart processes and automation and in order to enable development and efficiency. Can these processes be the main engine driving a company’s economic success?

Organizations must also be aware of the role of the human factor in successfully implementing processes, technological and innovative ones, that enable them to remain relevant in a competitive market. By using information systems, an organization can design assessment processes that it will benefit from at its various stages of development, including long-range strategic processes that will require lateral changes to implement.
Up to a certain point, an organization can continue to grow even without sophisticated information systems. But eventually it must incorporate technology, innovativeness, information systems and BI – all of these are tools needed for developing financial indicators, creating a budget and monitoring productivity, quality and customer support – or it will hit a glass ceiling. In such a case, a company will not be able to go on with its strategic processes or to focus on its core abilities to position itself in a competitive market.

There are a number of strategic, managerial and organizational challenges that underlie the need for innovation and technology. In their effort to become more efficient, many companies are slowed down by their inability to measure work processes and efficiency at important points in the developing processes and by relying on healthy and intelligent intuitions but not quantifiable data.
The organization should encourage employee motivation by measuring and helping teams manage processes effectively. The organization should create and encourage both cooperation between teams and online synchronization between departments in order to increase its efficiency.
Most organizations in all sectors – industry, commerce and government – depend on technology and smart types of communication, and customer demand for information and transparency continues to increase.

Technology has created market opportunities for many new products, new ways to deliver customer service, new forms of business and new business models. The digital shift is cross-sectoral and industrywide. Businesses of every type provide digital services to compete in the realm of customer experience, which is essential to the success of businesses in Israel and abroad. Investing in IT involves a major strategic change, but many companies continue working with outdated systems because of the financial difficulties, complexity and challenges involved in migrating to advanced software. The use of IT systems is operationally and strategically beneficial to an organization but implementing them is accompanied by many challenges along the way: accurately mapping out the organizational activities and processes, allocating financial resources, integrating processes and increasing customer retention.

Can technology and innovation lead companies and organizations to strategic success despite the costs involved? The entire organization must integrate complex long-term processes that require considerable financial investment and risk-taking to position itself in a global, competitive, ever-changing and dynamic environment. What are the chances of an organization surviving in such a world in the absence of a long-term strategy that takes into account the environment and the competitors, that constantly improves managerial and organizational processes and that keeps up with technological changes and innovation to remain relevant?

By Orly Roah Senior Consulting at RAnalyst Management and Consulting Financial & Strategy.