DailyPost 2084
TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIELD!
The success of the technology in the field by way of functionality, upgrade, value add, ease and control, which it should bring to the user and the enterprise, is its holy grail. Does this thought even occur of the different stakeholders in the field, from the consultant or the system integrators to OEMs, and anybody who happens to a part of the ecosystem. We have brought forth a technically professional world or professionally technically world, which we claim to be seamless and has that really happened, or the tall claims have left clefts, crevices and gorges, which never pass the technical threshold mentioned. The technology in the field tells us a different story compared to what that field of technology claims to have achieved and delivered.
The issue might not be with the technology per se, but if undelivered to the last mile and the last man with the same precision and utility, then what purpose does it have? In the same manner as we have a product supply chain, we have a supply chain of technology with the human expertise required to create and operate to run simultaneously with it. Does it happen? Was it intended to happen? If it were, then did right and relentless efforts were taken to make it happen? Technology adoption, adaptation, right project delivery, more often than not has been seen from the point of view of what your role was in the project and a die-hard attempt to prove that you have made it happen. The fate of the overall project is none of your concern. Today, we are in a technological age and stage in this country, when in spite or despite whatever customer experiences and feels, the technology is made to sell.
From the OEMs to the customers and all in between are not on the same page. Leave aside that, how many of you found one vendor maintaining the same warmth of relationship from the business development stage to the post-delivery stage. Does this ever happen? Everybody is out to sell technology, product, service or even body shopping, at the fastest pace, with least amount of effort / travel / man days / expenditure and scoot with the moolah, as if there would be no tomorrow or a second project. The man who finally represents the technology or the project or even runs it, is the poorest specimen of that technology. The great products and projects companies’ stalwarts leave the battle much earlier.
The effort to make the technology happen is literally missing; from the requirement gathering stage itself. Though lacking knowledge, the customer tries his level best to turn the tide, with twinkling dreams to technological transformation, but that does happen. If it does, we need to calculate the cost and effort, and at whose expense. Generally, the customer is left high and dry, struggling with have baked solutions, different silos not knowing what to do with them, and managing his enterprise because he cannot allow it to fail. If only large part of the projects just in the last five years were to have worked fine, we would have been at a different stage of development. Full proof and fail-safe delivery have never been on the agenda. Yet they say the customer is the king, because that sells. If tech customers get together, then they might change things. This cannot be the fate of technology.
TECHNOLOGY IN THE FIELD IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM THE TECHNOLOGY OF PROMISES.
Sanjay Sahay