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Dave Hitz, who is the founder and EVP of NetApp, imparted some interesting information in one of his blog posts. This specific post breaks out some functional differences in roles in different size companies for CIOs and CTOs which was an enlightening experience for me. What Dave did impart that I most found of value where the five stages of technology adoption.  Dave went on to further describe these stages as monitor, evaluate, standardize, proliferate, and retire.

‘I asked for details about these different stages. He described monitor as a casual awareness of a technology, maybe from reading occasional articles or white papers, and keeping an eye on it to determine when to investigate more deeply. Evaluate is when you seriously consider whether a technology is valuable enough and mature enough for you to deploy. To make a technology manageable in a large enterprise environment, you standardize on a particular set of configurations and management processes. At that point, you can proliferate the technology broadly, until a replacement technology is ready, at which point you retire this one.’

Though these categories do apply for CIOs and CTOs, I believe they are useful to others down the ranks. Part of the function of the group in which I am a member is to stay up with technologies and continue to drive innovations and newer technologies where they can best help the company succeed and improve the environment the people who work at the company must support. I think that if we inculcate these categories into our processes it will help define a ‘lifecycle of technology’ that give some meat and measurability to one of the most hard to quantify part of our job descriptions.

I wonder how other companies handle the processes of new technology. My company is fairly global and large and groans due to the weight of red tap. I am curious how others see this and how other companies, both big and small, approach this process.

I find Dave’s blog often filled with interesting views and information. Should you desire to read his blog, it can be found at blogs.netapp.com/dave.