Leaping head first into new trends

The rate at which new technological trends emerge is staggering. There was a time when it would often take a couple of hundred years to develop, adopt, and then progress a new technology. In the last decade this has changed to just years, even months or weeks in certain instances.

This poses both huge opportunities, and challenges, for organisations of any industry. Technology became central to organisations in the past 10 years. Now this central point is evolving from technology to digital. Everything is moving online, into the cloud and into people’s hands on the go. The challenges that exist for organisations can be summed up in a few questions:

1. What trends should we be considering?
2. What does it mean to implement this trend into our organisation?

One thing New Zealand organisations are guilty of, is jumping head first into the potentially shallow waters of new trends and concepts. This isn’t all bad, it shows that we are hungry, adaptable and opportunistic. However, what can fall out of this is an unprepared infrastructure and holes emerging further down the track.

The double-edged sword of digital is that in a speed, disruption and transformation driven environment, without the appropriate quality processes in place, digital initiatives can expose your organisation to risk much quicker than traditional IT projects.

This places a greater responsibility on managers to consider the strategic value of each digital aspect and develop a measured approach to implementing it.

For each digital aspect (e.g. Big Data, Cyber-security, Mobile Platforms, Social Technology), there are a series of best practices around the implementation process which organisations should be benchmarking against.

Some of the most important best practices incorporate the testing strategy for digital projects. There are different considerations for each digital aspect of your solution and it is important to ensure that these are all included in the testing strategy.

Qual IT conducted a survey of some of New Zealand’s largest organisations around their understanding of digital and how it impacts their company. Through this we have produced a series of best practices that cover the digital aspects big data, cyber-security, mobile platforms and social technology. To find out more about these best practices and how they can help your organisation leap head first into a new trend with strategic and measured precision.