Technology Integration.

• Author: Kim, Sandra
• Position: Review

Iansiti, Marco Harvard Business School Press, 1998. (249 pp)

Reviewed by Sandra Kim, Policy Analyst, GFOA Research Center.

Technology integration and technology applications across the enterprise are recurring and important issues that public finance managers are faced with. Technology Integration by Marco Iansiti provides IT managers with a framework for researching, developing, and producing new technologies. Iansiti states that the process of technology choices rests in integrating the activities that define the interaction between the traditional roles of research and of product development. His premise rests on the fact that many businesses no longer have a stable technology base, but rather a dynamic environment composed of novelty and complexity. He calls this new managerial method "technology integration." Iansiti sites successful examples from Intel's development of a new microprocessor and Microsoft's Word 97. Both firms needed a proactive technology integration so that their process was effective. The creation and development of novel technologies was not their only challenge. The primary challenge was to pinpoint precisely what to do to determine which technologies should be followed and to determine how the technologies should be integrated.

Iansiti promotes the use of proactive technology integration processes to be at least as important as other managerial and organizational activities associated with traditional product development such as product management methods, leadership qualities, and organizational structure of the development phase. Technology integration is a grouping of subtle organizational processes that merge uncertain information of burgeoning technology information with the complexity of the manufacturing and user environments.

According to Iansiti, the methodology can be extended to a variety of situations for new product development as long as they have defined performance measures. Technology Integration identifies a quantitative relationship between the technical outcome and the organizational process that precedes it. What drives technology today is fundamentally different than traditional pursuits of technical knowledge.

Three factors are crucial to how R&D organizations work:

1) knowledge generation - this provides an understanding of the impact of...