Blog #4 disruptive tech

"When a market isn't in transition, gaining market share is hard". The longer a specific market exists the more it's profit margin gets chipped away by competition. But if that market keeps changing than it's a continual gold rush to take advantage new opportunities. But to do that companies need "to disrupt themselves". Currently our department at CMU is transitioning to SalesForce and it is extremely painful. The amount of fires I have to put out in terms of finding lost transactions has made us less efficient, not more. But SalesForce is also becoming industry standard for fund raising and Alumni engagement tracking, so for us to not adopt this would be a huge mistake. The cost of adopting this has also been massive. In the John Chambers article he sights customers as the catalyst for making a change, for us it's our competitors. Our department benchmarks it's success by looking at other ivy league institution and comparing their endowments to ours. If there are trends that are happening among our "competitors" we tend to adopt them as well. This may not give us an advantage but it is the minimum necessary to keep up with the pack. From the Clayton M. Christensen article it is clear that our adoption of SalesForce is a "sustaining" technology so it is unlikely to cause us any problems in the long run. Indeed its adoption was an easy case for our Information Systems director to make because it was being adopted by many of our competitors. By contrast "disruptive" technologies offer the lowest initial profit potential and are not adopted until the case is easy to make and by then it's too late. Fund raising is not exactly and innovative endeavor and if there where a "disruptive" technology coming to these departments on college campuses I'm sure we would miss it. However in terms of customers and investors we are not really beholden to anyone in how we raise funds. Our "customers" do have demands in how their money is spent but they are not as particular in how we ask for it as long as we ask nicely and make them feel included in what the University is doing. So if there was a "disruptive" technology our stake holders may be largely indifferent to us adopting it. Our customers dictate the investments of the University as a whole but do not care how our department operates. Our real investor and customer in this sense is CMU, and Central Finance, they would be the ones to keep us away from something new that did not promise immediate high returns.
Principle #5 in the Clayton M. Christensen article mentions accounting software as a technology that may be surpassing it's users needs. When this happens the buying criteria changes to functionality, convenience, and price. CMU Central Finance, University Advancement, and others on campus have adopted Excel4Apps, an add on program for excel that enables automatic spreadsheet updating and drill down capability. This product certainly has outstripped my needs and many others from what I hear. The decision to adopt it and what has been pitched to various departments by Central Finance, is not that it does anything new and great but that it can help us do what we do now allot faster and with less busy work. It is only a better version of the same thing and so would be considered a "sustaining" technology. Fortunately it doesn't seem likely that our line of work is going to run into too many "disruptive" technologies, but if we do, I'm sure we'll miss it.