Category: Tech Strategy

As a tech executive, one of your crucial responsibilities is to develop a technology strategy. The question is, how do you embark on this task? Where do you begin? Tech 2 Exec offers examples and information to provide a foundation for your tech strategy development. For any tech exec, this mentorship can be extraordinarily beneficial to your career.

Handling Technical Debt

Tech debt hinders innovation in organizations. As a tech executive, eliminating debt while transitioning to new technology is crucial.

Here some examples of areas to focus on for an immediate impact: 

  1. Fix simple bugs like error messages displayed when a user submits a form, broken page layouts in browsers, or invalid data being displayed.

  2. Eliminate hard coded references, like IP addresses, as the limit the flexibility of the application.

  3. Address UX issues such as issues like inconsistent navigation, unreadable small font, and inconsistent use of UI elements across pages may confuse users.

  4. Migrate to the latest supported release of vendor solutions.  Backdated software can introduce bugs or add cost due to vendor maintenance fees. 

  5. Fix inconsistent naming/ code structure which can cause lengthy troubleshooting time – like searching for a class by name that’s inconsistent in the codebase.

  6. Improve automated test coverage to increase maintainability, which ensures that logic covered by tests can be modified without resulting in bugs.

  7. Change the structure of the code to make it more testable. This can usually be done in small, incremental changes, each of which renders a little bit more code subject to test coverage.

  8. Minor refactors – For instance, when a well-factored class grows to 800 lines, it can be beneficial to split it into multiple classes. Another example is making minor code changes to leverage a new library release that includes useful bug fixes or features.

  9. Deprecate obsolete code – Old documentation no longer necessary. New code may differ from the old, potentially causing bugs.

Eliminating tech debt can be one of those “low hanging fruits” that technology executives are looking for to reduce IT costs.

Strategy Interview Questions

We’ve been talking about how to build a technology strategy. As part of the strategy build process, tech exec need to interview other leaders to get their thoughts in order to ensure that everyone feels they had input.

A strategy without consensus typically falls apart.

Some of the questions that you’ll want to include in the interviews are:

General Questions

  • Can you provide a snapshot overview of your group, i.e., size, business focus areas?

  • What are your organizations priorities/ the strategic objectives?

  • Is your group a strong consumer of technology?

  • If yes, what applications do you use on a regular basis? Are there external applications that you use?

Technology Environment Questions

  • Today, do you feel that technology is supporting your business strategy?

  • If not, what do you see are the current issues?

  • What would you like to see for future technology initiatives?

  • Are there areas where you feel automation could help reduce cost or increase productivity?

  • What do you consider the highest value systems today? Which have the highest risk – client, regulatory or brand issues?

  • Do you know who to communicate with for IT issues? Who is your contact?

  • In your area, are there regulatory and legal other legal obligations that IT must be aware of? How are these obligations communicated?

  • Do you feel that there is a good level of customer satisfaction related to IT and IT systems?

IT Operations Management

  • Do you feel the IT systems that you use are stable and perform well?

  • Do you feel that the IT systems you use are high quality? What can be improved?

IT Innovation Management

  • Is there confidence within the business towards IT and the services provided?

  • Do you feel IT today provides a process and mechanism to improve or transform the business? Do you feel it could in the future?

  • Is IT today viewed as a “Business Partner”? What is the perception of the IT team?

  • Do you feel IT is supporting/ understands new and strategic business opportunities? How are business opportunities communicated to IT?

Closing Questions

  • This project is critical to helping build a solid and integrated set of initiatives for supporting business growth. What areas do you feel need attention or could really add value, from your perspective?

  • Anyone else who you feel we should contact to discuss IT systems and/or strategy?

  • Do you have any additional thoughts? May we contact you again if we need to follow-up details?

This is an interview framework. The best interview is freeform, comfortable, and covers the mentioned key areas. As an executive, asking strong questions for a deeper technology needs assessment is critical. Share findings with interviewees after completing the process. Ensuring understanding and agreement is important for strategy success.

How a Tech Exec Should Deal with Technical Debt

In prior posts we’ve been talking about technology strategy. Tech execs must possess a robust strategic approach to steer technology direction and secure agreement on projects and budgets within their organization. Addressing technical debt is crucial in every IT strategy. As part of our strategic building process, we include the following step:

5. Analyze Current IT Environment: A large piece of the strategy build effort occurs in this step.  Here analysis of the current environment (current state, or status quo) is documented and reviewed in order to do reflections and backward looking. 

During the current state assessment, watch out for technical debt. It’s crucial for CIOs to prioritize reducing tech debt, whether staying on the current platform or migrating to a new one.

Technical debt often stems from decisions made to expedite application deployment. It can manifest as deviations from project specifications, reliance on outdated technologies, or even shortcuts in the supporting infrastructure. Let’s explore a few instances where technical debt tends to arise:

Unpredicted expense

As pressure mounts for teams to deliver quickly, especially for applications on a lengthy development roadmap, evolving business needs may necessitate accelerated release schedules. This pressure can tempt teams to resort to shortcuts, such as hardcoding IP addresses, limiting logic flexibility and hindering future application transition to the cloud.

Evolving technology

During the system’s initial release, the technology choices were appropriate. However, the aging infrastructure requires maintenance over time. As applications become older, changes become more likely. Upgrading the operating system or supporting software may be costly but necessary for effective system operation.

Misunderstandings

Incomplete business requirements result in rework. Improperly documented and misunderstood application support processes cause user frustration and costly errors. Effective communication with experienced professionals prevents technical debt. A resource management plan provides valuable, low-cost support for applications.

Managing technical debt is a delicate balance between cost and quality to meet business deadlines. If left unchecked, it hampers speed and agility in addressing business needs, gradually accumulating as the application ages.

See the next post for idea on how to eliminate Technical Debt.

Click here to see a post on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Develop a Charter

Yesterday we talked about building a strategy. If you are a tech exec, you need to be able to develop and understand what’s in your strategy, even if you have a team building it for you. Key to any project, including your strategy build, is the Charter.

The Charter is made up of the following:

  1. Objectives: purpose of the project and identification of background work already completed that could contribute to it.

  2. Critical Success Factors: document the rules of engagement and the make-or-break conditions for a successful outcome of the strategy.

  3. Scope: clarify and limit activities and coverage of the strategy.  Scoping should focus on outlining deliverables and process and leveraging available data and capabilities to refine approach.

  4. Governance: define the approach to running the planning process, including people and team structure.  Determine with whom and how collaboration takes place in order to help facilitate the planning exercise.

  5. Methodology: define and document the framework to guide the project.  Outline process that’s to be used to complete the effort successfully (steps outlined below)

  6. Deliverables: describe the expected deliverables and link to methodology/ process above.

  7. Timeline: document timeline and outline dependencies and durations.

The charter helps you keep expectations under check. But it’s a great document to build together with all stakeholders.

As a team, coming up with the vision for the project just helps lead to a successful outcome.

Technology Strategy Framework

As a tech exec, a well-defined technology strategy is crucial for supporting the IT direction in your organization. This strategy helps gain consensus on budget allocation and focuses effort by aligning technology initiatives with business priorities. In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, it is essential to stay ahead of the technological curve and utilize emerging tools and resources to drive innovation and growth.

One key factor in developing a successful tech strategy is understanding the needs and goals of your organization.

This includes analyzing current processes, identifying pain points, and determining where technology can play a role in improving efficiency and productivity. By involving key stakeholders from various departments, you can gather valuable insights and create a comprehensive roadmap for implementing new technologies.

Another aspect to consider is the ever-changing digital landscape. With advancements such as cloud computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things (IoT), there are numerous opportunities for organizations to leverage technology for competitive advantage.

Key to the success of building a technology strategy is ensuring that you have capable staff, and they are regularly engaging key stakeholders.

To begin the build process, you need a solid technology strategy framework to shape strategy. Here are the key pieces:

1. Develop a Charter – to get initial agreement on scope of the strategy

The charter will serve as a proposal for the strategy effort and help to ensure buy in by outlining the scope.  The charter also helps sell the idea to business and technology leadership. See more about the Charter at this post.

2. Capture the Business Context – vision, mission, values, and strategic goals

It’s critical to the success of the strategy effort to understand and align with business priorities. At this point it’s important to capture and document a clear understanding of the business direction and needs. See more about business alignment at this post.

3. Develop IT Mandate: Vision, Mission, and Objectives

Review current strategies to align with vision, mission, and objectives. Define Technology’s high-level goals to set IT’s purpose and guide activities in the strategy. See more about IT Mandate at this post.

4. Define Critical Success Factors (rules of engagement)

List success factors to establish high-level requirements that require top management support for the Strategy’s success. Details will be defined in future steps like governance and implementation roadmap, setting the initial baseline. See more about CSF’s at this post.

5. Analyze Current IT Environment

A large piece of the strategy build effort occurs in this step.  Here analysis of the current environment (current state, or status quo) is documented and reviewed in order to do reflections and backward looking. Here is a post about analyzing technical debt. The level of technical debt is something that you will discover as part of the as-is analysis. See more about analyzing the current environment at this post.

6. Identify Strategic Actions and Outcomes

After analyzing the current technology environment, define and document the list of strategic actions and outcomes.  These items would need to be discussed and refined via debate with stakeholder leadership. This step is critical for feeding the upcoming benchmarking exercise. See more about strategic actions at this post.

7. Envision Target State and Assess Gaps

The IT mandate and analysis of the current environment should allow for definition of strategic goals and a conceptualization of the future state.  To achieve this goal, follow an Enterprise Architecture modeling approach that allows for depiction of a potential future state. See this post target environment visioning.

8. Develop Governance – to facilitate and enforce strategy execution

Establish a governance team and structure to ensure that the plan will be executed, communicated, monitored, and reviewed once established. This governance team should comprise key technology and business stakeholders. See more about governance at this post.

9. Develop Roadmap – initiatives with priorities, estimates, ownership and schedules

Finally, outline tangible activities that need to be executed in order to bring the Strategy to life. This is the implementation plan that ties strategic initiatives with the organization’s goals and/ or themes.  Strategic initiatives are the result of analyzing the gap between current and target technology states. See this post of the initiative roadmap.

If you would like to see all the posts related to building a technology strategy, please see this page.

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