 The following is a reprint of the December 2008 "Intelligence" column from ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership's publication, Associations Now. ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) is the membership organization and voice of the association profession. Founded in 1920, ASAE now has more than 22,000 association CEOs, staff professionals, industry partners, and consultant members.
Like many associations, the Society of American Florists (SAF) keeps tabs on technologies that affect its industry through a standing technology committee. But despite meeting twice a year, the stunning pace of technology innovation would have the committee reeling from the tech onslaught unless it was all written down. Hence, SAF's Technology Whitepaper.
To identify various technologies and recommend their adoption (or not) among floral businesses, SAF's technology committee uses a simple "bus" analogy, with three categories:
- The bus has left. If you're a floral business and you're not using technologies in this category, then you are almost certainly losing money and/or losing efficiency in your business processes.
- The bus is here. If you're not using "the bus is here" technologies, then you are missing out on potential revenue opportunities and/or on processes that can likely improve efficiency.
- The bus is coming. If you adopt one of the "bus is coming" technologies, you may be spending too much time and/or money on technology without proven results.
When the committee edits the whitepaper, the members talk about each technology and discuss whether any updates to its status are needed based on adoption and successful implementation by floral businesses. Technologies in the whitepaper will naturally jump from one category to another as time passes and early adopters find success or new technologies become standard fare. Much of the movement happens in the "bus is here" and the "bus is coming" categories. For example, in the latest edition, the following items were deemed to have "arrived" and moved from "bus is coming" to "bus is here": remote backup service, voice over internet protocol, and biometrics. The committee believed there has been enough implementation with these specific technologies to no longer label them as future tech.
This style of categorization is applicable in any industry, of course, but it's important to keep your specific industry's needs in mind. Every industry adopts technology at its own pace, and some technologies that may be useful to one industry will be irrelevant to others. For instance, in our last meeting, the committee added laptop computing and digital photo editing software to the "bus has left" and "bus is here" categories, respectively, because they were obvious omissions. A totally new technology, online reputation management, was also added to address the growing requirement for floral businesses to monitor the blogosphere, chat rooms, and feedback sites for references, good and bad, about their shops. Meanwhile, two technologies were removed from the list altogether: virtualization and video game consoles. While virtualization is hot among medium to larger businesses, a majority of floral businesses simply aren't large enough to need it. Also, the committee believed video game consoles should no longer be included because the members see no clear business value for florists.
To check out all the technologies SAF's Technology Committee has identified and how they're categorized, click here.The original Whitepaper post can be found here.
Renato Cruz Sogueco is the chief information officer at the Society of American Florists in Alexandria, Virginia. Email:
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