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By Dr. Arthur Langer
This article focuses on defining the components of technology and how they affect corporate organizations. In other words, if we step back momentarily from the specific challenges that information technology poses, we might ask: What are the generic aspects of technology that have made it an integral part of strategic and competitive advantage for many organizations? How do organizations respond to these generic aspects as catalysts of change? Furthermore, how do we objectively view the role of technology in this context, and how should organizations adjust to its short- and long-term impacts?
TECHNOLOGICAL DYNAMISM
To begin with, technology can be regarded as a variable independent of others that contribute to the life of a business operation. It is capable of producing an overall, totalizing yet distinctive effect on organizations: it has the unique capacity to create accelerations of corporate events in an unpredictable way. Technology, in its aspect of unpredictability, is necessarily a variable; and in its capacity as accelerator—its tendency to produce change or advance—it is dynamic. My contention is that, as a dynamic kind of variable, technology, via a responsive handling or management, can be tapped to play a special role in organizational development. It can be pressed into service as the dynamic catalyst that helps bring organizations to maturity in dealing not only with new technological quandaries but with other agents of change as well. Change generates new knowledge, which in turn requires a structure of learning that should, if managed properly, result in transformative behavior, supporting the continued evolution of organizational culture. Specifically, technology speeds up events such as the expectation of getting a response to an email, and requires organizations to respond to them in ever-quickening time frames. Such events are not as predictable as what individuals in organizations have experienced prior to the advent of new technologies-particularly with the meteoric advance of the Internet. In viewing technology then as a dynamic variable, as one that requires of organizations systemic and cultural change, we may regard it as an inherent, internal driving force—a form of technological dynamism.
Dynamism is defined as a process or mechanism responsible for the development or motion of a system. Technological Dynamism characterizes the unpredictable and accelerated ways in which technology, specifically, can change strategic planning and organizational behavior/culture. This change is based on the acceleration of events and interactions within organizations, and which in turn create the need to better empower individuals and departments. Another way of understanding Technological Dynamism is to think of it as an internal drive recognized by the symptoms it produces. The new events and interactions brought about by technology are symptoms of the dynamism that technology manifests. The next section discusses how organizations can begin to make this inherent dynamism work in their favor on different levels.
RESPONSIVE ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMISM
The Technological Dynamism at work in organizations has the power to disrupt any antecedent sense of comfortable equilibrium, or an unwelcome sense of stasis. It also upsets the balance among the various factors and relationships that pertain to the question of how we might integrate new technologies into the business—a question of what we will call Strategic Integration—and how we assimilate the cultural changes they bring about organizationally—a question of what we will call Cultural Assimilation. Managing the dynamism therefore is a way of managing the effects of technology. I propose that these organizational ripples, these precipitous events and interactions, can be addressed in specific ways at the organizational management level. The set of integrative responses to the challenges raised by technology is what I am calling Responsive Organizational Dynamism (ROD), which will also receive further explication in the next few chapters. For now we need to elaborate the two distinct categories that present themselves in response to Technological Dynamism: they are Strategic Integration and Cultural Assimilation. The diagram below shows the relationships.
For the purposes of this article, I will only discuss the Strategic Integration component of ROD.
Next Page: Strategic Integration
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