Financial Benefits of Emerging Technologies

There is one primary question most business executives ask when considering the adoption of emerging technology: what kind of economic return will I get in proportion to the expenditure? That question is of paramount concern to businesses ranging from sole proprietorships to Multi-National Corporations (Rheingold, 1994, 32-28). Answering that question has given rise to a new profession -- technology managers, or TMs (Chesbrough & Teece, 1996, 68).

In a commercial situation, TMs are responsible, as a rule, for five main areas: a) keeping upper management informed about new technologies that might improve profitability, b) keeping all current technology (computers, phones, fax machines, and so on) operational, c) supervising training for all divisions within a company to ensure that workers are maximally efficient, d) maintaining cost and production analyses for the technology currently in use, and e) making educated guesses about the future needs of the company to ensure that the company remain competitive while staying within budget. To accomplish these various tasks, the TM is constantly requested to prepare analytical reports for management's consideration (Watson, 1998, 1).

The structural premise of this analysis is to treat it as a typical technology report dealing with the following problem. Using a hypothetical company, Abdulla Mahij (AM) Service, that is a 100-employee firm specializing in answering r

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the senior management level where the old adage that if something is not broken it does not need to be fixed. The first challenge, then, is to convince senior management that the implementation of technological change will do nothing but benefit AM. It is important that senior management be in total accordance with the decision, since the way senior managers present the decision to their subordinates is often critical to the eventual success of the technology adoption (Orlikowski, Baroudi, 1991, 123). A secondary constraint is the fact that decisions can be hindered by the sheer mass of technological choices. In the past, AM has avoided the issue by staying with the system of mainframes linked to servers. This choice is practical, but also hinders the productivity AM needs to move to the next stage of growth. Can the same types of computers be used in each and every division of the company? Deciding on a computer configuration is the tip of the iceberg. AM must then choose an operating platform (DOS, MAC, UNIX, etc.), and then select the right software for the job. A truism of this field is that once a decision is made, that only opens the door to ten more questions that were not originally considered (Orlikowski, Bar
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Approximate Word count = 2757
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)