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Implement First, Ask Questions Later (or Not at
All)
STEPHEN J. ANDRIOLE
Companies used to spend years clarifying business requirements before they would
even think of launching new software. Today, cheaper cloud-based apps mean that
implementation decisions are made on the fly — and there’s no going back.
For decades, companies required their IT teams to
identify, model, and validate business requirements
before writing a line of code or adopting a new
technology platform, product, or service. Today, that
approach seems almost quaint. Companies no longer
build giant flowcharts, analyze tasks, or model business
requirements in advance of deploying new technology.
They just pilot and adopt — often before they have a clear
idea of the business problem they’re trying to solve. Once,
this launch-first mentality would have been considered
heresy. Yet it has become the norm, driven by the
accelerating pace of technology change, the fear of losing
market share to disruptive new players, and the ease with
which new technologies can be implemented through
cloud-based delivery. This is a challenging environment,
particularly for tradition-bound organizations. But it’s the
new reality and CIOs must adapt, or they risk
Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg nicely permanently falling behind the competition.
summarized a modern philosophy about technology
innovation when he spoke about the need to “move fast As part of a larger study on changes in technology
and break things.” Increasingly, that same mindset implementation, my team spent two years collecting
appears to drive how companies implement new survey and interview data about the evolving relationship
technologies as well. And this phenomenon stretches between business and technology. We talked to people in
beyond Silicon Valley. business roles and technology roles at companies across a
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range of industries. The most significant finding was the around — which is why many tech solutions get
rapid death of detailed requirements analysis and discovered as part of the implementation process rather
modeling. Among survey respondents, 71% believed that than in advance of it. Said a little differently, many
technology can be deployed without a specific problem in companies have no clear idea what they will do with
mind. Just one-third said they have a clearly defined specific technologies but believe that there’s huge
process for the adoption of emerging technology. Perhaps potential in the technology that will become clear over
most surprising, half of the respondents described their time and that they have no choice but to quickly adopt
pilot initiatives — small-scale, low-cost, rapid testing of emerging technology if they want to digitally transform
new technology — as “purely experimental,” with no their companies to remain competitive.
requirements analysis at all.
This approach is possible because of the way software
We heard a consistent theme. As one business process itself has changed. Rather than massive, enterprise-wide
manager at a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company put it, systems that cost millions and take years to implement,
“We’ve abandoned the strict ‘requirements-first, software today is cloud-based and relatively inexpensive.
technology-second’ adoption process, whatever that really It often addresses highly specific problems, sometimes
means. Why? Because we want to stay agile and limited to a single business unit or department. And
competitive and want to leverage new technologies. technology is evolving continually. As a result, companies
Gathering requirements takes forever and hasn’t made feel they need to move fast, try a lot of things, and accept
our past projects more successful.” the inevitable failures. If something doesn’t work, the
stakes are a lot lower — costs are measured in tens of
Different Software, thousands of dollars rather than millions, and timelines
are a few months rather than a few years.
Different Approach
The very idea that technologies would be acquired and “We’ve piloted new devices and applications — especially
deployed without documented, validated requirements mobile applications — at a quick pace,” the technology
flies in the face of what technology and business manager at an insurance company told us. “The good
professionals were taught for decades in the 20th century. news is that failures happen fast and are usually cheap
It was often the business side that insisted upon elaborate because of cloud delivery. The cloud changes the way we
requirements gathering and validation. Executives think about pilots. It makes it easy for us to ‘fail fast and
frequently complained about the rush to deploy untested fail cheap’ — something everyone likes, especially the
technologies or — worse — technologies with unverified CFO.”
total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) or return-on-investment
(ROI) models. This approach isn’t 100% new, of course. So-called
shadow IT — in which business units go rogue and create
Today’s adoption models assume that emerging new their own work-arounds, implementing technology
technologies drive requirements, not the other way without the knowledge or permission of the CIO — has
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long plagued many companies. In the past, those efforts Th
Thee Dr
Driiver
erss ooff R
Raapid T
Teechn
hnoolog
logyy
could have major ramifications, breaking security
protocols and contaminating data sets. Today, shadow IT Ado
dop ptio
ionn
has essentially won. Technology at many companies is Across industries, there is a broad consensus that the
now highly decentralized — it happens at the level of opportunities to reduce costs and digitally transform are
individual business units, and the heads of those units the biggest factors behind the shift to more rapid
have wide latitude to launch pilot tests when they spot implementation, followed by competitive fear.
something that might work.
As we heard from the business unit vice president at a
media company, “Shadow IT short-circuits requirements
analysis — which isn’t all bad, right? The business units
will do what they need to do to make money, and
sometimes that means they’ll adopt technology
immediately if they think it might solve some problems.
... There’s no way I can shut it down even if I wanted to,
which I don’t.”
Based on interviews and responses from 150 managers
Little Analysis of Pilot and executives in 2016-2017, ranging from analysts to
CEOs in various industries, when asked about the
Tests evolving relationship between business and technology.
Perhaps the most surprising finding from our analysis
was that most of the companies piloting new technologies Reducing costs was a big factor for companies, along with
fail to quantitatively measure the impact of the pilots in the opportunity to digitally transform themselves and roll
terms of ROI or TCO. This is another major departure out new business models. Yet competitive fear was the
from best practices of the past, when companies had third most common factor. Companies face such a broad
elaborate metrics in place to measure the returns on these range of threats and disruptions, including new market
investments. Today, the embrace of new technology can entrants from a wide variety of directions, that they feel
be driven by fear as much as a quest for improved they have no choice but to jump into new technology
performance. Companies are moving so fast that they headfirst.
don’t have time to gauge results.
Under this mindset, formal after-the-fact analyses of pilot
Indeed, when we asked survey participants about the tests miss the point, and there’s little time for them
factors behind rapid technology adoption, the answers anyway. Business leaders don’t have the luxury of
were relatively consistent across industries. (See “The debriefing after a pilot to ask, “How well is this working?”
Drivers of Rapid Technology Adoption.”) If it works, they’ll know. Besides, the thinking goes, the
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ROI just isn’t as important when the “I” — the actual In this world, the new best practices are to move fast,
investment in new technology — is so low. adopt early, and experiment widely. Companies should
identify a specific transformation target, like supply chain
Notably, our findings show that the pressure to move fast planning, manufacturing operations, or customer
in technology adoption is not coming from the C-suite or relationship management. They should also select a few
senior management but from business units closer to the technologies, such as analytics, artificial intelligence, or
action. The technology is changing so quickly — and location-based services. And then they should start
affecting operational functions several layers below them launching pilot tests to see what works, with the goal of
in the org chart — that most senior leaders can’t keep up rapidly scaling up winning initiatives.
with recent advances, let alone develop a strategic
approach to their deployment. Business requirements may literally be unknowable until
companies can try out the new technologies, and many of
New Best Practices those pilots will fail. But the alternative — trying to move
It would be hard to find a CIO from the 1990s who would slowly and deliberately, with business requirements
have predicted the death of formal, validated business clearly spelled out in advance — is no longer an option.
requirements and the rise of a technology-first adoption Companies should expect to discover solutions through
process. Even today, this philosophy will undoubtedly the implementation process rather than in advance of it.
anger and confuse traditional corporate budgeteers who They’ll break things, undoubtedly. But they’ll also stay
crave precision. But we live in a different world in which ahead of the competition.
speed matters more than precision, and there’s no going
back.
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About the Author Technology at the Villanova School
of Business in Villanova,
Stephen J. Andriole is the Thomas G. Pennsylvania.
Labrecque Professor of Business
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