How is strategic technology management revolutionising the global business environment?

For business owners and managers, investing in the right technologies is crucial to ensure the efficiency of their in-house business activities. Sourcing technologies and assessing their value allows you to focus on issues pertaining to understanding technology trends and breakthroughs. Read on for more insights into technology management strategies and their role in the global business environment.

What do we mean by ‘global business environment’?

This term encompasses the evolution of international trade and includes a combination of factors that reshape the dynamics of global commerce, which in turn have led to the formation of a highly-integrated business environment. The three major factors driving the global business environment are technological advancements, competitive dynamics, and intercultural effectiveness.

Playing a large role in influencing enterprises around the world, the global business environment impacts business decision making, particularly in terms of resource use and capabilities. Some basic components of the global business environment include suppliers and clients, technology improvements, government activities, economic trends, owners and competition, and laws, social trends and market trends.

Introduction to Strategic Technology Management

Here are a few common terms that you’ll come across in the world of strategic technology management:

Strategic Technology Management Systems (STMS) efficiently manage critical issues of a business, which may include controlling its products or service process technologies. This technology management typically goes through the cycle of creation, monitoring, assessment, transfer, acceptance, utilisation, maturity, and decline. 

The strategic management of technology comes with a wide range of well-founded conceptual frameworks. It focuses on management processes and tools, coupling them to bring forth innovative practical applications.

Business management tools support the creation of the company's overall mission and goals. Such tools are generally employed to explore a business’s development using structured methods to gather, explore, organise, and communicate data. In addition to decision-making and management, this feature also helps organisations to create and implement strategies to work toward key objectives.

Early-stage technology acquisition and protection emphasises companies to utilise their own internal research and development, rather than acquire technologies from external sources. This trend of developing technology internally allows businesses to bring in new technologies. It provides the company with the opportunity to develop innovative products, and eventually enter new markets. Making decisions about technology acquisition and protection at an early stage can provide structured guidance to businesses. This helps them explore available options and understand any trade-offs.

Roadmappingis a powerful planning technique that has been researched more and more in the past decade. It is highly graphical and collaborative in nature, supporting strategic collaboration between operations within the firm, and with other organisations. Roadmapping is a highly flexible and adaptable tool that fits any organisation’s needs, allowing them to improve communication across teams and divisions. Roadmapping supports a wide variety of business purposes, including the alignment of commercial and technical strategies.

Technology intelligencerefers to the process of capturing and delivering technical information so that organisations develop an awareness of technological pitfalls and opportunities. Technology-based intelligence enables a firm to shape its technical strategies, emphasising operational fields such as development and technology acquisition. It comes as an added advantage for technology-based companies facing shorter technical life cycles in a globally competitive business environment.

Technology evaluation addresses some of the challenges that businesses face today. This may include uncertain market and technology forecasts, complex technologies and their utilisation, difficulty in calculating future revenue for specific technologies, limited knowledge availability for business decision making, and how risk avoidance may lead to decreased innovation.

How is strategic technology management revolutionising the global business environment?

When we look at this all as a whole, strategic technology management is a guaranteed way to ensure your business maintains its competitive edge. Technology is constantly changing, and by strategically managing your organisation’s use of these business technologies you can even improve the structure of your work.

When more businesses strive to strategically manage their technology, competition becomes stiffer in your industry, and you can focus on advancing in the field. Taking control of your organisation’s technology can also help cut costs in unexpected ways, and even improve employees’ skills.

On a larger scale, technology is connects people and businesses around the globe faster and with more precision. We can now see businesses in other countries as both competition and as an inspiration for how to operate. The ability to share ideas easily and finding new ways to remain competitive is one of strategic technology management’s greatest benefits.

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