Strategy is at the core of all successful businesses and their functions, whether it’s financial strategy, marketing strategy or growth strategy. In the years past, technology strategy was often absorbed into general business strategies if it was even considered at all. Over recent years, as technology became more disruptive and advanced, this type of approach was no longer effective as technology considerations required more focus. Today, without a well defined technology strategy, your business could be at risk of missing out on opportunities and falling behind the competition. So your technology strategy should be treated with the same level of importance as all other business strategies, enabling you to be fully prepared for the future and aligned to your business goals.
Anthony Maiello, CTO and President of VNCTech Group, wrote a short article titled “7 Steps to a Robust Technology Strategy” in April 2002. You can find this article at our company BLOG: https://www.vnctechgroup.com/post/7-steps-to-a-robust-technology-strategy
In his latest article, Anthony Maiello, CTO and Presient of VNCTech Group takes it from these 7 steps and discusses the types of real business benefits (5 benefits) you and your company can realize from implementing a well defined technology strategy.
The 5 Benefits
A well defined and implemented technology strategy offers many real business benefits to an organization. If developed and defined properly, your technology strategy focuses on the impact technology will have on your organization’s business goals. Let’s take a look at 5 major benefits.
A Comprehensive and Clear Roadmap the Entire Company Understands and Supports
A major reason technology strategies fail is due to lack of internal communication across the company. This failure comes in many forms from not being articulated well to not including all departments during development of the strategy ensuring you have a supported holistic view.
A well defined and implemented technology strategy should become a credible reference point for the entire company. This requires impeccable and thoughtful internal communication ensuring all employees and executives are on the same page working towards common goals.
Without a clear and well communicated technology strategy, you will end up with multiple touch-points and developers implementing their own technology solutions. This will result in resistance to change, poorly aligned products, higher costs, low morale, and employees feeling left out of the process.
It is absolutely imperative to take internal communication and collaboration very seriously during and after developing technology strategy.
Alignment to Business Goals
One of my proudest achievements is witnessing the overwhelming positive impact a well planned technology strategy has on the collaboration and internal workings across an entire company.
This is because a well defined technology strategy is aligned directly to business goals and objectives enabling the company to meet overall business goals. So taking the time to detail exactly how technology will achieve business goals and how it can be measured leading to success, is worth its weight in gold. This is good for happy clients as much as it is for internal morale.
Develops Company Vision
A well defined technology strategy incorporates what your company needs in the future and what the market and competition will look like. This in itself helps your company effectively develop and/or enhance the business vision enabling the company to be more prepared and ready for what’s down the road in the future.
It’s important to note that a typical technology strategy that focuses on achieving business goals will not be a static document … in fact it will indeed be evolutionary. A well defined and implemented technology strategy will have prioritized projects achieving business goals in a series of milestones that are achievable, actionable, and focused on immediate and future business growth.
Improved and Optimized Operations
As noted above, a well defined technology strategy focuses on achieving business objectives with prioritized, clear and achievable actions that have the most business benefit. If this is done correctly, specific actions will be taken that optimizes people/teams, processes and tools across the company to improve output, collaboration and customer communication. I always encourage my clients to take the opportunity to become more agile and improve efficiencies as these sometimes are low hanging fruits when implementing a well defined technology strategy. You will see big savings as well as extremely happy and satisfied clients.
LeapFrog the Competition
We already know the lack of any type of technology strategy will become a problem for your company and competition will likely pass you by. On the other hand, a well defined technology strategy will drive tremendous value and help your company leapfrog the competition with extremely happy clients.
A well defined and implemented technology strategy will enable more revenue and higher margins while also delighting your customers. As your company becomes known for its impeccable ability to implement a well defined technology strategy, you will find employee retention will improve and businesses will be more willing to work with you.
Are you ready to do this ?
There is no doubt you can define and implement your own technology strategy. Or you can hire outside technology strategy experts to help you along the way. Many 3rd party companies who specialize in helping companies deliver successful technology strategies have the expertise, tools, process and background to quickly ensure success the first time by avoiding damaging and expensive pitfalls and problems that cause delays and frustration.
Please don't hesitate to contact VNCTech Group to help you along your Technology Strategy journey.