Assessment of Emerging Technologies: Evaluating the Business Case and Technical Proposition | Course

Learning Outcomes:

2. Be able to identify and apply emerging technologies tools towards the development of an advanced IT product as well as justify and evaluate their developmental decisions

Description of the assessment

Businesses and organisations need to continually develop their systems and technologies in order to be able to meet the challenges of the modern globalised world.

Their challenge, however, is to be able to make rational decisions about which technologies they should incorporate in their businesses.

Academia and other places of research continually invent new IT concepts, products and approaches, which are often over-sold and many of them fail to deliver the promised benefits and destroy significant amounts of shareholder value.

You will choose one of the current emerging Hype Curve technologies that is interesting to you. You will agree this with your tutor (this counts as a student negotiated assessment).

You will then identify a specific Use Case within which to critically evaluate the case for or against adoption of the technology in your chosen Use Case. This critical analysis will require the collection of a range of information and data which will allow you to develop an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology and to cut through the hype that surrounds all new technologies.

The products under consideration for the module will typically be in the very early stages of the Gartner IT Market Clock.

During the early adoption stages of emerging technologies, many innovative businesses will carry out experiments and develop prototypes to generate data that can be analysed and evaluated to understand the realities of applying that technology.

Potential users of these technologies need to be able to critically evaluate the promises and capabilities. This may be done using proof of concept experiments or by generating and collecting data from simulations or the published white and technical papers that describe the technologies.

This should be a continuation from your topic in Coursework 1 for the module.

You have chosen one of the current emerging Hype Curve technologies that is interesting to you. If you decide to choose a different technology, then you will need to agree this with your tutor (this counts as a student negotiated assessment).

You will then identify a specific Use Case within which to critically evaluate the business case for or against adoption of the technology in your chosen Use Case based on an evaluation of data that you will collect from a real world prototype or simulation, or from suitable public sources of data in the event that you do not have access to suitable technical systems and software to create a prototype.

You will produce a 5 page (+0 / - 10 lines) report in the Springer LNCS format (the page count starts at the beginning of the Introduction and finishes at the end of the Conclusions and Recommendations section). The report will critically evaluate the capabilities of your chosen Emerging technology to deliver its promised benefits.

This section will introduce your project, your proposed context for the Technology to be evaluated and justify your choice of an Emerging Technology and Use Case within which to evaluate the technology.

Critical Evaluation and Justification of the Requirements for Data Generation

This section will define and justify your approach to generating the data that you will need in order to evaluate the technical proposition for the chosen Technology.

• If you are implementing a prototype or a simulation of a software system, then you will need to justify your choice of a suitable environment (software package) and outline and justify your requirements specification that will lead you to capturing suitable data.
• If you are using open source / published data, then you will need to justify why you are using this route and then define and justify the data that you will be using.

Critical Evaluation and Justification of the Technical Business Case of the Technology

You will need to develop and justify the framework that you will use to critically evaluate the Technical and Business case for your technology and use case.

You will the critically evaluate the Technical and Business case of your technology to deliver the proposed capabilities and benefits.