Designing an organization that is committed to technological innovation is challenging. One of the value propositions of software products is that development of an initial product can be treated as a fixed startup cost, and this had led to a management mentality that development is a fixed labor cost. On the other hand, technology changes rapidly, and adapting to these changes can be leveraged as a competitive advantage by firms who embrace this change. Learning how to harness these changes can enable firms committed to embracing technology to move faster than their competitors. Meanwhile, the failure of large firms to adapt fast enough can lead to a slow decline of even well-established blue chip companies.

1. Encourage Continuous Learning about Technology

Make continuous learning part of your company’s culture. It is useful for everyone to have a high-level understanding of the basic trends in technology as well as to dive deep into some particular niche.

Have you heard about ReactJS? How about the spinoffs for other media, like ReactVR (virtual reality / 3D video framework), and React Native (React which compiles to native Android and iOS)? What about APIs? Do you understand the value proposition of the cloud? Who are the big three cloud providers, and what are the basic trade-offs of each? Do you know about Github? Why are some developers leaving Github for Gitlab? How can continuous integration and continuous delivery transform your organization’s development processes? What’s the story with artificial intelligence? Is my business ready for real-time analytics? Is blockchain worth exploring for my business?

One way to stay up to date is to subscribe to some technology mailing lists. A few of my favorites are Founder Weekly, Python Weekly and Hacker News.

To dive a little bit deeper, MOOCs on Coursera, Udacity, and MIT Open Courseware are valuable. A considerable amount of free content is available from top universities, and certificates for these courses are a great way for companies to give incentive to employees to keep their skills up to date.

I recommend that software engineers be encouraged to spend some time during business hours to take courses (and earn certificates). Coursera certificates are not very expensive (about $79), and knowledge gained from these courses is immediately applicable in many software systems. It’s a win-win.

I like to write about all of these topics and build rapid prototypes with emerging technologies. Subscribe to my mailing list to have great information delivered directly to your inbox.

2. Think about Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

If you are rolling out a new technology, make sure that it has an Application Programming Interface (API). APIs turn your technology solutions into building blocks. It makes it possible to deliver the value of that service in different ways, whether that is a custom service, self-service product, or user interface across various devices. Don’t overlook the value of having a good API system in place.

In 2018, creating APIs is very easy. There are great tools for this, including NodeJS, Go and Python, and it is possible to deploy many APIs with very little overhead in 2018 using cloud technologies like AWS Lambda.

3. Measure Impact; Don’t Punish Failure

Leverage technology to solve business problems and measure the impact. Estimate the financial impact on your business to set priorities, and educate your technology teams about how the business operates.

Some technology teams focus on innovation. With software and technology, it is often possible to try out many new ideas in a short period of time. These teams should be encouraged to measure the impact (or potential for impact), and should not be punished for failure. Success in the long term is all about impact on the overall business, not the trial and error required for innovation.

4. Make Data a First Class Citizen

Make data a first class citizen in your organization. Traditionally, data has been secondary to business logic. Collecting data can often be seen as a necessary side effect to maintain state such as tables in a database. However, data has become one of the most valuable resources for unlocking value.

There are two important facets about data that are critical. First, rather than storing a snapshot in time of records, it is important to start understanding how this state changes over time. Second is that data storage and maintenance is a complex problem on its own, and this carries along with it costs for collecting and storing higher volumes of data.

5. Focus on Orders of Magnitude

One way to leverage technology is to focus on new technologies that could bring a product to market 10X faster. Will a new tool enable your development team to write 1/10 the amount of code to deliver a new product feature? Adopting new tools early can be a huge competitive advnatage.

Developers often joke about the mythical 10X developer. I don’t know if the 10X developer exists, but I have observed that some developers are continuously mastering new tools to improve their workflow.

6. Commit to an Agile Mindset.

Whenever starting a new software project, strive to get to the point of “working software” as soon as possible. From there, iterate. Progress depends on continuous delivery of working, valuable software.

I recommend that everyone, even non-developers, read the Agile Manifesto to understand the mindset. Agile does not mean fast and chaotic, though it can easily lead to chaos.

One framework for implementing Agile is known as Scrum. There is a similar document called The Scrum Guide. The Scrum framework has become common among organizations who adopt an agile mindset.

Agile and Scrum can be easily perturbed into rigid, constraining processes. In fact, the lack of overall vision can lead to chaos and scope creep. If that starts to become the case, those who are using Agile and Scrum should re-evaluate their processes in context of the two simple documents above.

7. Open Source Matters a Lot!

There is some incredible open source software out there. Before reinventing the wheel or licensing software from an enterprise vendor like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle, consider what open source solutions exist.

There are difference ways to harness the power of open source software. For some businesses, this means contributing useful libraries to the open source community. For others, this means leveraging and open source Software as a Service application to build a proof of concept.