We love the convenience of technology. Voice-activated devices to keep us productive and safe, automated chatbots that provide us with customer service in the wee hours of the night and enough data to understand our customers and improve business. However, in this ever-changing world of technology, we tend to overlook the impact that emerging technologies such as IoT and AI have on organizations and its people. As business owners we embrace the revenue growth, but what is it doing to our culture?

People drive culture. Their reaction to change shapes our work environment and can impact creativity, retention, and spending. How we empower our employees can make or break success when implementing a new technology into corporate strategy.

When driving technology as part of a strategy, many times we focus investments and training on vendor-specific technology. But before you hand over your top tech people to weeks’ worth of training, take a moment to assess who else will be impacted by the technology.

  • Did your executive team making decisions THINK about the value they are trying to achieve or is the hope that the new technology will generate value?
  • Does your project management team have the technical knowledge to know how and when to manage issues from the new strategy?
  • Can your sales and marketing team understand the impacts of the technology to effectively generate sales and market share?
  • Do the practitioners responsible for the technology have a strong foundation within the emerging technology to BUILD this new vendor-specific knowledge upon?
  • Is your team aware of how to SECURE your organizations current and future infrastructure to minimize risk during and post implementation?

By affirming your organization’s position on these questions you are creating an emerging tech culture. Not quite there yet? Empowering your team is as simple as educating and validating their knowledge of the emerging technology relevant to their organizational roles. I am not encouraging your entire organization get AWS certified, but rather invest in relevant, role-specific training and certification programs prior to and throughout implementation. Creating this culture will drive excitement and engagement that only humans can manufacture.

Megan is the COO of CertNexus. CertNexus’ THINK. BUILD. SECURE. programs take entire organizations roles and responsibilities into account for cybersecurity, IoT and soon, AI.

Check out our certification roadmap for all of our offerings and how you can promote building an emerging tech culture.

Think Build Secure Roadmap