Technology Portfolio Management (TPM) Best Practices

Overview

Emerging technology evaluation programs in organizations that are enthusiastic about technology adoption frequently apply thorough analysis to the opportunity dimensions — the capabilities the technology might enable, the efficiencies it might create, the competitive advantages it might provide — and cursory analysis to the risk dimensions. This asymmetry produces adoption decisions that underestimate the organizational investment required to realize the opportunity, underestimate the organizational risk accepted by adopting the technology, and overestimate the readiness of the technology and the organization to capture the value the adoption is expected to produce. The governance discipline of assessing risk alongside opportunity does not prevent emerging technology adoption; it produces adoption decisions that are realistic about what is required to make adoption successful.

Best Practice

Require that every emerging technology assessment explicitly addresses the risk dimensions of the technology alongside the opportunity dimensions, using the full secondary assessment dimension set defined in the Technology Assessment and Rationalization subsection. Specific risk dimensions that warrant particular attention for emerging technologies include: technology maturity risk — the risk that the technology is not yet mature enough for enterprise production use and that early adoption will require disproportionate investment in working around limitations that the technology’s developing ecosystem has not yet resolved; vendor or community viability risk — the risk that the vendor or open source community maintaining the technology does not have the resources or the organizational staying power to sustain the technology through the adoption lifecycle the organization requires; skills availability risk — the risk that the organization cannot develop or acquire the skills required to implement and operate the technology at the scale the adoption requires; integration complexity risk — the risk that integrating the technology with the organization’s existing portfolio is more complex, more expensive, or more disruptive than the adoption evaluation anticipated; and regulatory trajectory risk — the risk that the regulatory environment applicable to the technology’s use cases is evolving in a direction that will impose compliance obligations the organization has not yet accounted for.

Benefit(s)

Balanced emerging technology risk and opportunity assessment produces adoption decisions that are realistic about the organizational investment the adoption requires and the organizational risk it accepts, rather than optimistic about the opportunity and naive about the risk. Organizations that apply this discipline consistently report that it does not meaningfully slow their adoption of emerging technologies that genuinely warrant adoption, but that it does prevent the adoption of technologies that were not ready for their proposed use case, that required more organizational investment than was anticipated, or that created regulatory complications that were foreseeable but not foreseen. The discipline is not a brake on innovation; it is the evidence-based evaluation that distinguishes innovation from impulsive adoption.