Accelerated technology development: the good, the challenging, and the important

I was recently looking at properties near the beach and it quickly became obvious that, in addition to kitchens and baths, technology can also date a property. How many of us have 40lb CRTs mounted on our walls? How many of us have 802.11 b only access points? Hopefully, very few given the rapid increase in the rate of innovation.?

For most of its lifespan, the television remained an imposing, space-eating thing - more a piece of furniture than anything else. Yet look at the evolution of the post-cathode ray television - the development of multiple screen alternatives, all of which were drastically slimmer - all delivered by rapid innovation and faster development cycles.?

The need for speed

Is the speed of acceleration in the industry driven by technological capacity, competition or user demand? As with all complex things, it’s a combination of all three, with extra ingredients, like the focus on improving cycle times and reducing risk, added in for extra spice. But most importantly, there’s the nature of engineering itself.

The thing about engineers is that when you're looking at a problem, you want to fix it. In the tech sector, one problem is that you're committing all this capital and resources to product innovation, so it’s natural to want to improve the innovation process as part of the solution. The creativity of the industry is unleashed on creating better products, and improving the way that they’re made. This drive leads to change, which prompts both competition and customer expectations.?

The technology cycle

When it comes to technology, I believe that innovation and the customer experience are inextricably linked. I think of the development process as being a bit like a three legged stool - to create a new product that stands up, you need to make sure it's supported by three sturdy legs. The first strut is to ensure that the required components already exist, the second relies on the product being a fit for the tech ecosystem you're launching into, and the third, and in many ways most important, is that it answers a customer pain point.

No matter what speeds the development cycle may reach, those three elements sit at its core like ballast. Conversely, like any mechanism with moving parts, the velocity of the process has an impact on its components. In an era dominated by accelerated technology development, it pays dividends to keep an eye on these effects, whether they fall into the category of the good, the challenging or the important.??

The good

I don't think it’s an accident that acceleration has become such an ingrained aspect of the tech sector, or that it has spun even faster during the pandemic years. It may have begun as problem solving, but it quickly evolved into a feature and so the speed at which quality products and services could be produced became an intentional focus. This, of course, stepped up the competitive aspect and further fuelled customer expectations.

The pandemic has only accelerated the demand for, and take up of, technology across industry sectors. Source McKinsey & Company - The new digital edge: Rethinking strategy for the postpandemic era

It’s that combination of competition and expectation that has driven a lot of the good that has come out of accelerated tech. It has led to increased capabilities, lower costs, better products and a richer ecosystem into which the next round of product developments will be launched. It’s allowed the industry to develop tech that was once seen as science fiction but is quickly becoming central to both design and the customer experience, like voice recognition and AI.

You can see it most clearly when you trace the evolution of accelerated technology cycles by looking at it through the lens of a single device. The laptop is the perfect example. As a device, its form factor hasn’t changed in any kind of radical way since it was launched, at least until very recently with the advent of flexible, foldable devices like the ThinkPad X1 family. However, what you can do with it has changed dramatically, and much of that change has occurred in the last decade.

I think of a laptop as being a ‘gateway device’ because it’s used for so many different reasons, and unlocks so many different experiences, from creative to productive, from collaborative to immersive. In a few short decades, it’s gone from being a portable word processor to a portal that opens where the customer decides they want to go. It’s an entertainment centre, a flexible productivity tool, a collaborative creative environment and a way of staying in touch with the world. Every time we unlock a new experience for our customers, we either introduce a new capability to the device, or refine an existing one.

That cycle of development, delivery, experience and expectation creates its own virtuous feedback loop, which is one of the great goods to come out of the entire accelerated tech development process. It’s really quite remarkable.

The challenging

There are a number of challenging aspects to the accelerated technology development cycle, both for those of us who work in the field and for our customers. I firmly believe that the good and the important outweigh this aspect, however we do ourselves no favors as an industry if we ignore the challenges.

Keeping up with technology obsolescence can be confronting for developers, manufacturers and customers. While teenagers might thrive on novelty and keep pace without hesitation, for most of us staying on top of device and software requirements can feel like yet another demand.?

Customers rely on us to keep their devices doing what they need them to do, and we rely on customers being responsive to updates and expansions in order to ensure that their devices continue to operate. One of the most important aspects of technology development is meeting customer pain points, and that includes making it easy for people to keep up with the pace of change by making the process and environment as simple and seamless as possible.?

Another question that is its own challenge is whether the days where you had time to reflect on what the next technology could bring are gone for good? The truth is, I don't think it matters. The reality of the situation is that things have changed. And we have to move at the speed at which the world turns, which is not necessarily the speed at which we're comfortable. The way I look at it is that in this ecosystem everyone in the industry has one choice, we can either adapt to the pace of demand or go out of business.

It is challenging, but like so many in the innovation field, an area in which Lenovo excels, I relish a challenge. Sure, there are a lot of nuances to be taken into account. If you make a mistake or go in the wrong direction, the time you have in which to recover is much shorter than it once was. On the other hand, you get to see the outcome much, much faster too. There’s more flexibility, more room for taking risks and more opportunities to experiment.?

The important

If you break it right down, I think the accelerated technology cycle has led to three particularly important outcomes: a new way of working, superior components and a richer and more diverse technology ecosystem.

When we talk about the acceleration of new technology development, we often focus on the devices, because the rate at which new hardware is introduced to the market and the rate at which a type of technology hits that mass-adoption target, have indeed shortened. But the way we develop and build those devices has become simpler and more streamlined, even as the devices themselves have become more complex and powerful.

Accelerated technology and innovation are a choice and rely on leadership, processes and platforms. Source: BCG Innovation Benchmarking Tool.

With speed has come agility, and more specifically agile development methodology. Yes it means moving fast, which can increase the chance of a misstep, but that is the reality in which we are all operating. And it comes with great benefits as well as challenges.?

The ability to simulate and iterate has markedly improved outcomes, but even more significant is the vastly superior quality of modern components. cramming more that goes faster into smaller physical form factors, and so on. so forth, is a phenomenally difficult thing to do.?

The core that enabled modern computing was both a miracle and a hard limit to experimentation and development. Whatever your vision, your product had to be able to operate using memory and processing speeds that seem laughable now. It’s impossible to overstate how important smaller, faster and more stable components have been to the rapid evolution of technology as an industry.

A result of all of this development has been to create a richer ecosystem into which innovative products can be launched. And, of course, those same innovative products add to the richness of the ecosystem, helping to create another virtuous feedback loop. It’s a complex but fascinating mesh of influences, and one of the most important aspects of accelerated technology from a product development point of view.?

Getting connected

Of course, you can’t fully address the various aspects of accelerated technology development without taking a quick detour to include the advent of the internet. The internet has been revolutionary for the tech sector. Before the mass adoption of domestic internet connections, software had to be released and distributed via a physical medium - from floppy discs to a CDRom glued to the front of a magazine.?

It could take all day to download and install a relatively simple piece of software via a 13k modem - so what did the industry do? It adapted to the circumstances at the same time as developing genuine solutions. In essence, the entire history of technology is one of adaptation, evolution and acceleration.