3e2a1b56-dafb-454d-87ad-86adea3e7b86

Chapter 8 Process technology 227
Implementing process technology
Implementating process technology means organizing all the activities involved in making
the technology work as intended. No matter how potentially beneficial and sophisticated the
technology, it remains only a prospective benefit until it has been implemented successfully.
So implementation is an important part of process technology management. Yet it is not
always straightforward to make general points about the implementation process because it
is very context-dependent. That is, the way one implements any technology will very much
depend on its specific nature, the changes implied by the technology and the organizational
conditions that apply during its implementation. In the remainder of this chapter we look at
two particularly important issues that affect technology implementation: the idea of resource
and process ‘distance’, and the idea that if anything can go wrong, it will.
Resource and process ‘distance’
The degree of difficulty in the implementation of process technology will depend on the degree
of novelty of the new technology resources and the changes required in the operation’s
processes. The less that the new technology resources are understood (influenced perhaps by
the degree of innovation) the greater their ‘distance’ from the current technology resource
base of the operation. Similarly, the extent to which an implementation requires an operation
to modify its existing processes, the greater the ‘process distance’. The greater the resource
and process distance, the more difficult any implementation is likely to be. This is because
such distance makes it difficult to adopt a systematic approach to analysing change and learning
from mistakes. Those implementations which involve relatively little process or resource
‘distance’ provide an ideal opportunity for organizational learning. As in any classic scientific
experiment, the more variables that are held constant, the more confidence you have in determining
cause and effect. Conversely, in an implementation where the resource and process
‘distance’ means that nearly everything is ‘up for grabs’, it becomes difficult to know what
has worked and what has not. More importantly, it becomes difficult to know why something
has or has not worked. 13 This idea is illustrated in Figure 8.7.
Figure 8.7 Learning potential depends on both technological resource and process ‘distance’