Tools/Technologies

This chapter deals with the means for transforming inputs into outputs in goods and service industries. Modern tools/technologies are heavily reliant on computer usage for manipulating things, data, and people. Tools/technologies enable enterprises to accomplish transformational tasks that would otherwise be more difficult if not impossible. Tools/technologies serve as a double-edged sword that may augment either mechanistic and/or organic forms of enterprise design. Harnessing the value of tools/technologies for realizing a composite system lies in melding socio-technical factors in development operations so that both constraints and creative freedoms are simultaneously optimized. The strongest effect of tools/technologies is their deployment in ways that enhance the agility of development systems.Statistics for each subset of tools/technologies practice is provided so that readers may compare their scores vs. the best, average, and lowest in the SPOT II database. Readers may score practices predictive of performance to benchmark themselves against best-in-class (BIC) standards and use the Big Bang algorithm to calculate tool/technology practices yielding the greatest benefit for their enterprise in Appendix Table 7A.The standalone benefits of tools/technologies in engineering transformations are limited because sophisticated equipment and software are widely available at reasonable prices. However, the effects of tools/technologies on performance do often add to variance explained in performance over and above that predicted by organization and process.Moreover, the effects of organization and process practices on performance are synergistically stronger in many instances if concomitantly deployed with tools/technologies. For example, electronic tools enable organizational team members to exchange information from diverse functions and locations asynchronously as well as synchronously. Electronic tools enable processes to be electronically distributed and continually updated so they are dynamic rather than static. Tools/technologies practice adds to the variance organization and process, which explains the development performance in two ways, additively and interactively.Combinations of six subsets of tool/technology with eight subsets of organization are shown in Table 6.2 and eight sets of process practices in Table 6.3. Readers can optimize their combinations of tool/technology practices with 3 illustrative organization behaviors in Appendix Tables 7B.1, 7B.2, and 7B.3 and 3 illustrative process practices in Appendix Tables 7C.1, 7C.2, and 7C.3.