Technology-Intensive Organizations

Department of Engineering & Technology

Texas A&M University-Commerce

Technology-Intensive Organizations

Introduction

The speed, with which technological competition is currently increasing, has imposed several challenges on the leaders of organizations to adopt strategic postures and devise new ways to develop new technologies and create market opportunities for their products. Technological progress is seen as the result of the competition that exists between technological regimes among different configurations of design or between different options of a design common to a large number of company. As technology evolves, future developments can be bound to a particular paradigm. Technology-intensive organizations are characterized by the introduction of radical innovations and products with short life cycles. These companies vying highly competitive markets and have the potential to grow at high rates. The new generations of products bring better performance and lower prices, reducing profit margins but also requiring increasing investment in R & D. The decision makers of these companies are constantly challenged to create new markets and find new opportunities in an environment characterized by in deterministic processes.

Discussion

New technology is changing not only existing work environments; it also creates new environments and occupations as a response to the need for support that technology creates. This is how learning and organizing technology-intensive organizations looks in such a new working environment (an IT support unit), which empirically studied in this project. This new organization is contrasted ago, on an analytical level, with an organization where traditions of knowledge, work and responsibility has a long history (a hospital ward) and new technology is introduced (Lytras & Naeve, 2005).

IT help-desk employees work in shifts around the clock to maintain the system and to provide global support to its customers. Learning and problem solving are essential to provide continuity in this business. The organization of work is variable and requires constant coordination and strategies to keep everyone updated. They work towards the experts as well as users who are not themselves but the techniques that rely on the support. Entrepreneurs, executives, senior managers and other decision makers of the executive management give the ideas for the success of their business with much responsibility. The entrepreneurial and strategic thinking, decisions and actions of the executive management success along these ideas shaped the development and enforcement of fundamental innovation and change processes in companies. The sectors where competition is focused on innovation and application of technology give us more complex competitive environments to apply the concepts of strategic management. The use of technology is the primary reason due to which some technology-intensive industries such as medical imaging, aerospace or chemical industry dominate few large corporations established long ago. Other examples of such companies include the software houses and biotechnology companies.

In the twenty-first century, the so-called new economy has emerged as a phenomenon that those raw intensive economic activities in the generation and transfer of knowledge. This stage of transition to the new economy has raised recently the interest of many academics, public authorities and entrepreneurs, and proposing new paradigms that challenge the line of thought neoclassical ...