Theorizing Technology Communication & Media in Organizations

¶ … Digital Technology Adoption Lynne Boisrond Theorizing Technology, Communication & Media in Organization Dr. Denise Antoon Organizations operating in a digital environment are forced to develop digital strategies to be able to remain relevant and competitive in their respective industries. For this reason, digital technologies have become an integral part of business processes today. However, adopting digital technologies alone is not enough to ensure profitability and relevance in relation to one's competition.

Organizations need to put in place effective mechanisms for ensuring that the technologies they use respond to the specific needs of users, and incorporate buy-in from all key stakeholders in the organization. This helps minimize the risk of resistance. Moreover, it gives stakeholders a sense of ownership, and increases their commitment towards contributing to the strategy's success. In addition, organizations need to ensure that they put in place effective frameworks for addressing the pitfalls that could arise from their use of digital technologies.

This text presents a proposal that organizations could use to develop effective digital strategies. A Proposed Digital Technology Adoption Strategy Digital technology has become an integral part of businesses and organizations today. Its pervasive effects have resulted in the restructuring of organizations and entire industries. It is not surprising, therefore, that managers are getting increasingly interested in understanding digital technology innovations, and their effects on organizations.

Research has demonstrated that digital technologies produce significant benefits for organizations and can be a crucial source of competitive advantage if implemented effectively (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). For this reason, firms need dynamic tools to support themselves in the creation of effective digital technologies. Success in a digital world, as Nylen and Holmstrom (2015) point out, depends on how well organizations are able to organize innovation work and change their product and service portfolios to align with the digital environment.

The organization selected in week one utilizes internet technologies and emerging media to enhance its productivity and work processes. However, this alone does not guarantee success in the modern working environment. It is prudent that the organization develop an effective strategy for ensuring that digital technology realizes maximum business benefits for the organization. This text proposes a framework that the organization could use to support its ongoing improvements in digital innovation management. It covers six core areas: needs identification, user experience, value proposition, digital evolution scanning, skill, and organizational culture.

Needs Identification The success of newly-adopted digital technology is determined in part by how well it responds to the needs of users. In their study seeking to analyze the factors influencing the effectiveness of an organization's technology strategy, Ghobakhloo and his colleagues (2012) concluded that organizations need to assess available services and products "that are compatible with their need" (p. 56). This would help to ensure that the changes made are relevant and productive (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012).

The organization needs to identify the specific needs of both external and internal stakeholders, and then select digital technologies based on how well they respond to these needs. Needs can be identified by assessing what stakeholders expect, vis-a-vis what the organization delivers.

The organization could, for instance, conduct surveys, online or physically, to obtain views from customers, employees, owners, and other stakeholders, on what problems they have, what they would love to see the organization do differently, or what technological tools/digital media strategies the organization could adopt to improve stakeholder experience. Alternatively, the organization could identify needs by mapping business processes to determine the specific problems that stakeholders undergo. This knowledge could provide insight on what the specific needs of stakeholders are, and how they could be addressed through technology.

Uber Technologies Inc., an American-based taxi-dispatch company, offers a perfect example in this regard. The company observed the difficulty that customers were forced to go through in order to get a ride -- they had to call a taxi company, wait to reach a dispatcher, wait for a taxi to be dispatched, and keep communicating with the driver until they finally met.

The company moved to address this need by developing the Uber app, which links customers with taxi companies, allowing customers to summon the nearest car, and monitor its movement real-time on a map to know how far away it is. The organization needs to interact with its stakeholders as well as business processes to identify needs, and match the same with relevant digital technologies.

If, for, instance, employees are making deliveries late because they have to organize physical meetings and wait until their supervisors are around to obtain clarifications, the organization could consider creating mobile apps or introducing mobile devices to facilitate virtual communication. Proper needs identification helps to ensure that resources are invested in the most appropriate technologies or digital media, and losses resulting from counterproductive investments are avoided (Lim et al., 2013).

User Experience In addition to ensuring that digital technologies align with stakeholder needs, organizations need to ensure that the technologies they use evoke engagement, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing. Couldry (2012) expresses that digital technologies exist to improve communication and interconnectivity between people. For this reason, organizations need to ensure that their use of virtual meetings, tele-seminars, webinars, blogs, and social media networks help to improve interaction among the various stakeholders.

They ought to base their use of these media on social theory, which emphasizes the aspect of engagement and interaction more than that of communication in the use of digital media (Couldry, 2012). The organization should avoid using its blogs and social networks as mere platforms for communication, or passing information across to stakeholders; rather, it should view these platforms as platforms for interacting and engaging with stakeholders.

It needs to cultivate a culture of using blogs and social network sites to obtain stakeholders' views, respond to queries, and maintain constant communication with its external stakeholders. Moreover, interaction with internal stakeholders, particularly employees ought to be developed and maintained through closed groups on social networking sites, or mobile apps for members only. Stakeholder engagement is crucial to organizational success as it creates a sense of belonging, and makes stakeholders feel valued and important to the organization (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012).

This in turn drives them to identify with, and commit towards the betterment of the organization, and the achievement of objectives (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). It is also prudent that the organization ensures that its digital technologies allow for effective knowledge-sharing. The organization needs to emphasize the use of technologies that allow for effective knowledge-sharing (Gaal et al., 2015). Gaal and his colleagues (2015) express that knowledge-sharing contributes to the betterment/improvement of the organization.

To increase knowledge-sharing through digital media, the organization should create policies that favor discussions in online forums such as virtual meetings and social networking sites, as well as storytelling through blogs. Value Proposition Digital technologies should be able to create value for the organization. For this reason, the organization needs to assess the risk inherent in its use of digital technologies relative to the business benefits arising from such use (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). Social networking sites are platforms through which organizations interact with other stakeholders.

However, these sites could become harmful to an organization, especially if they are allowed to become distractive. This is one of the core risks of digital media use in the organizational setting. The organization needs to identify these risks, and create policies for governing the use of digital technologies at the workplace. This will help to ensure that digital technology realizes maximum value for the organization. Digital Evolution Scanning Digital evolution scanning involves examining the environment for possible innovation opportunities (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015).

According to Nylen and Holmstrom (2015), success in a digital environment depends on among other things, how well an organization can exploit opportunities and "generate an aggregated value through creating digital products and services that utilize existing components" (p. 63). In doing so, the organization needs to analyze the progress of digital technology in the industry and keep up-to-date with trends and associated usage patterns.

This it could do through gathering intelligence on which new technologies are on their way to the market, and how these are likely to affect its business and operations (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). This will help the organization stay on top of the competition in regard to taking advantage of new technologies. According to Ghobakhloo and his colleagues (2012), adopting emerging technologies ahead of competitors makes the adopted technology 'firm-specific' and imperfectly mobile across organizations.

This, the authors posit, gives the adopting organization additional business value that is unachievable by late users (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). Digital Skills Digital skills are crucial to the success of an organization's digital strategy -- it is only with the right skill set that an organization is able to take full advantage of opportunities in its digital environment (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). Moreover, as the digital environment evolves, the requisite skills needed to maneuver the digital world become more advanced.

Towards this end, the organization needs to put in place a framework for continuous learning, where evolving digital technologies are analyzed to create an understanding of their unique properties (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). Continuous learning could be achieved through the training and retraining of new and existing staff (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). The organization could additionally offer incentives to employees as a way of encouraging them to keep up-to-date with digital skills (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015).

Such skills can be a source of competitive advantage for the organization, helping it to not only take advantage of new technologies, but also achieve sustainable digital innovation management (Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015). To increase its digital skills, the organization could consider hiring external IT consultants or vendors. According to Ghobakhloo and his colleagues (2012), the assistance of external vendors, consultants, and expertise is one of the most important components of the digital technology adoption process in the organizational setting.

External experts carry out a number of duties in the digital technology implementation phase, including IS project management, recommending suitable software and hardware, training digital technology users, conducting requirement analyses of business needs, and encouraging employees to accept new technologies (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). External IT experts would be beneficial to the organization as they act as intermediaries to compensate or the absence of relevant digital skills in the existing workforce (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012).

Thong and his colleagues (2012) demonstrated in their study, that companies that make use of external IT vendors in the implementation of new digital technologies generally had more effective digital strategies than those that did not seek such expertise. Organizational Culture Organizational culture can be defined as an organization's way of doing things, through compliance with generally accepted attributes, values, and beliefs (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). Researchers contend that a favorable organizational culture is fundamental to digital strategy success in the organizational setting (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012; Nylen & Holmstrom, 2015).

According to Ghobakhloo and his colleagues (2012), many failures in organizations' digital strategies can be attributed to paying inadequate attention to the organizational culture, and its role in the implementation of new digital technologies. The authors posit that one aspect of a favorable organizational culture is flexibility -- flexible organizational cultures are more advantageous to successful deployment of new digital technologies than mechanistic and less flexible ones (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). For this reason, the organization needs to strive to make its organizational culture as flexible as possible.

This it could do by encouraging, and being open to changes in technology. Incentives could be offered to employees to encourage them to be innovative. Moreover, managers ought to strive to create a supportive climate, where employees are encouraged to innovate and be ready for change. Employees have been shown to have a stronger readiness for change prior to the adoption of new technologies if they perceive positive manager attitudes and strong human relations (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012).

Besides being open to change, the organizational culture ought to allow for effective networking and knowledge-sharing (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). The knowledge required for the successful adoption of digital technologies needs to be distributed across the organization (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). This would help to ensure that stakeholders at all levels understand the importance of digital technologies, and the impacts that such technologies are likely to have on them as individuals, and on the organization as a whole.

In the end, a favorable organizational culture would drive stakeholders, particularly employees, to develop positive attitudes towards technology and digital media. This would help to minimize resistance and its associated costs (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). Pitfalls to Effective Digital Strategy Implementation Organizations face a number of pitfalls in their adoption and implementation of digital technologies. The specific pitfalls likely to be faced by the selected organization have to do with lack of skills, high costs of strategy implementation, resistance to change, and intellectual property rights concerns.

Having been generally slow in the use of digital technologies relative to its competitors, the selected organization is deemed to encounter shortages in digital skills among its current workforce. A lack of internal digital skills within the organization could significantly hinder innovation and digital technology sophistication. Ghobakhloo and his colleagues (2012) express that this problem could be solved through training and continuous learning, as well as through the use of external digital technology vendors and consultants. Hiring external experts should, however, be based on the available financial resources.

Moreover, the organization ought to recognize that external experts' recommendations may not always be a perfect fit for the organization, particularly if the business objectives and strategies are not properly understood (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). For this reason, it is prudent that the organization put in place an effective analytical framework for assessing external consultants' recommendations in relation to organizational goals, objectives, and culture. A second pitfall to effective strategy implementation is cost.

In their study seeking to assess the impact of cost on technology adoption by Dutch firms, Walczuch and his colleagues (2000) found high costs to be the primary reason why companies in the Netherlands were not investing in digital technologies, despite understanding its importance. Businesses in the U.S. have also identified the high cost of digital technology as one of the main barriers to digital technology implementation at the organizational level (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012).

The direct costs of digital technology adoption include the costs of software and hardware, as well as installation costs (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). Indirect costs, on the other hand include the costs of personnel training, development expenses, the early cost of temporary loss in organizational productivity, organizational costs associated with transforming to new work processes, and all costs associated with changes to business systems and procedures (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). These costs raise the organization's overall competitiveness.

For this reason, it is prudent that the organization assess its financial capability prior to digital technology implementation. This would help to ensure continuity and would prevent a situation where the digital strategy developed is unsustainable. The third pitfall to effective implementation is resistance to change, especially on the part of employees. Humans are programmed to resist change owing to the uncertainty associated with it. Digital technology strategies are therefore, likely to face some kind of resistance from employees in the early stages of implementation.

This resistance could hurt the organization's digital strategy if left unchecked. The organization could minimize employees' resistance to digital change by cultivating a favorable organizational culture (Ghobakhloo et al., 2012). A number of strategies could be used to develop a favorable organizational culture. First, managers need to be supportive regarding the implementation of the.