February 20198 MAKING THE MOST OUT OF AR TECHNOLOGYBY STEPHEN WITHERDEN, TECHNICAL FELLOW ­ SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, BECAIN MY V EWAs a strong advocate for the transformative nature of augmented reality (AR) technology for about two decades now, it is heartening to see that the time for AR appears to have come. With Microsoft planning to deliver over 100,000 HoloLens devices to the American military and breathless predictions of the market share for AR growing to USD $60.5 billion by 2023, there is one thing most commentators agree on: AR is going to develop slower and be more transformative than its cousin Virtual Reality (VR). How then can you, as an innovative early adopter of technology, make the most of this emerging technology? Empowering tinkerers to establish use casesFirstly, acknowledge that technological innovation in an organisation does not typically start in a centralised fashion. The adoption of the microcomputer in the 1970's was characterised by pockets of adoption by individuals, which eventually coalesced into the more centrally funded and managed ICT services we have today. The risk with adopting AR is it is quite easy to buy, but difficult to apply. Simply buying the technology as a pool resource and managing it as you would (for example) a laptop, will result in it sitting as a rapidly depreciating trophy in a cabinet. Rather, find a champion for the technology: a tinkerer who has the time to and interest in learning how the technology works and its applicability to your business. The tinkerer needs to be inquisitive, have the time and resources to explore and above all be interested in solving problems with technology rather than just the technology itself. Give them the technology, the device is theirs. Let the ideas spring from this decentralised ownership rather than centralised control.Most who have explored AR are at this point in their AR adoption journey: having completed a few proofs of concept and proven (or disproven) the technology for their specific use case. Managing change for real benefitYou do not adopt technology for the sake of technology itself. However, once the use cases have been identified, you need to extract the value out of the innovation as thoroughly as possible. All technology projects are improvement projects and all improvement projects are change projects. Thinking about a technology implementation project in this way highlights a number of key things you need to ensure if you are to extract the value of the technology. Because the technology is being deployed to make an improvement, it is important that the improvement is measured by taking a baseline of performance and ongoing measurements. Not only to validate the business case but also for the gratification of those people involved in the change themselvesSince you're implementing change you need to manage that change. Managing change is a well-established
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