Maximise Your Technology Investment - Tap Into Your Technology Culture
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

An organisation's technology culture has an enormous effect on its ability to identify technology-driven opportunities, connect them to business goals, prioritise across different opportunities and initiatives and implement technology projects wisely. Robin Neidorf introduces the technology culture inventory, a medium to gather and benchmark your inputs on your organisation's technology culture so that you can then play to the company's strengths and weaknesses.

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Sometimes the technology is there, but an organisation's culture simply doesn't support it. We continue to see this dynamic play out, for example, in enterprise social tools, for which the challenge isn't how to install sharing features but how to get users to take advantage of them. Sarah Dillingham's recent article about organisational sharing explores this very topic from the perspective of encouraging users to identify their own interests in sharing knowledge and resources.

Culture is defined, however, from the top down, and the technology culture in evidence at the highest levels of an organisation has an enormous effect on its ability to identify technology-driven opportunities, connect them to business goals, prioritise across different opportunities and initiatives and implement technology projects wisely.

Before you can make the most of your organisation's technology culture - leveraging what you do well and working on what you do less effectively - you have to understand that culture's characteristics.

Developing a Technology Culture Inventory

FreePint has developed a simple tool to start a "technology culture inventory", which can gather and benchmark your inputs on your organisation's technology culture.

This tool looks at:

• Engagement: how engaged are the leaders within the organisation in technology-related strategy and decision-making?
• Prioritisation: does the organisation have tools, processes and measurable goals to support the way it prioritises amongst the wide range of possible technology projects and initiatives?
• Implementation: is the organisation disciplined about creating technology-related project teams, and do those teams follow a documented process for piloting and rolling out projects?

Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses

At a recent meeting of the Pharma Documentation Ring, I had the opportunity to present the technology culture inventory to over 30 information managers in pharmaceutical companies. 25 of these managers had completed the technology culture inventory prior to the meeting.

I presented respondents' average ratings for the key characteristics in the inventory as well as specific examples of anonymised responses and how the different cultural patterns might influence the work in that organisation.

Figure 1 shows the inventory results for three example organisations from this exercise.

For Company A, the respondent gave relatively low ratings for their company’s level of engagement, higher ratings for its ability to prioritise, and the highest ratings for its ability to implement projects.

In contrast, for Company C, highest ratings were recorded for engagement, followed by implementation and then prioritisation.

For each of these companies, stakeholders must take a different approach to moving technology-related projects forward. The advice I always give is to play to your strengths while addressing your weaknesses.

A fuller discussion of technology culture can be found in the FreePint Subscription article, Understanding Technology Culture... and What You Can Do About It. If you have a FreePint Subscription, you can log in now to view it.

Implement an Inventory

If you’d like to create a technology culture inventory for your organisation, contact me at robin.neidorf@freepint.com to learn more. Participation, including a custom report, is free for qualifying organisations, including all organisations with a FreePint Subscription.

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