With many new emerging technologies starting to take precedence, they can seem complicated and convoluted despite the potential advantages (and disadvantages) that they bring.  Major companies are embracing the rapid pace of change and taking in these new technologies, this in turn, will create pressure on other companies to adapt to the new realities created by these unavoidable changes. This does not make it any easier for small and medium sized businesses with the added pressure.

GO Productivity will help you integrate new technology by assessing your business, working with you to develop an action plan to apply and adopt these technologies. However, it’s not just the technologies themselves, it’s also the skills and capacity building needed to keep up with changes, where GO can help facilitate your organization in the right direction towards being more competitive.

The top 4 skills that have been identified for businesses, owners, managers, and digital workers are:

1. Strategic Thinking and Problem Solving
   Figuring out better questions and designing better answers and delivering better results for operational improvement will be the starting point going forward.  Customers are asking for faster response times, lower delivery costs and suppliers will need to be engaged in continuous improvement.

1. The ability to collaborate with others
   Project approaches are starting to integrate suppliers earlier in the design, engineering and execution processes. New technology approaches such as robotics, automation, big data and analytics and block-chain will require more supplier collaboration in inter-dependent networked relationships.
2. Leading and Developing Others
   Key barriers to adoption of any emerging technology are the lack of talent to use the technology effectively and lack of a clear business case to justify the investment.  What workforce training is needed, where can you get it and how do you keep training lean and agile so workers can adapt and adopt to new technologies.  These technologies will not be static, they will keep emerging and will often and constantly be replaced by entirely new ideas and technologies.
3. The Ability to Manage Increasingly diverse teams
   Diversity and globalization will be prevalent moving forward.  The ability to work in diverse team will be borne of technological issues, functional roles and responsibilities, cultural differences, as well as age and gender related differences in work groups.

The changes to businesses as a result of emerging technologies are inevitable, complex and continuous.  The early adopters will gain most, if not all the competitive advantage.  The “wait-and-see” adopters will remain in business but not thrive from these new technologies and may eventually be left unable to compete.

GO Productivity has the skills to help you assess your current situation, determine a realistic set of operational change goals and help co-create a do-able action plan for you to get there. We also stick around and help close any gaps, keep on track and deliver on your plan.

GO Productivity is a registered not-for-profit, Alberta based nationally engaged advisers to help small and medium sized enterprises become more productive, innovative, forward moving, and competitive through our ARC Program (Assessment, Road-mapping and Coaching).

To get started today with GO Productivity, email us at start@goproductivity.ca