Accelerate Your Career with Best Practices and Lessons Learned
Category: Tech Strategy
Welcome to the Tech2Exec Strategy category, where we help you craft a comprehensive technology strategy—vital for any tech executive’s success. Here, you’ll find expert insights, analysis, and practical tools to align technology initiatives with business goals, keeping you ahead in the competitive tech landscape. Whether enhancing efficiency, driving innovation, or leveraging new technologies, we offer resources to develop a strong, forward-thinking strategy. Our guides cover topics like digital transformation, cybersecurity planning, and data-driven decision-making, all designed to empower your strategic vision and execution.
As the chief tech exec of your company, you are faced with a nervous CEO/CFO/COO who wants to cut costs amidst economic uncertainties. Understanding the potential benefits of a move to cloud technology in reducing total cost of ownership, they have tasked you with exploring the expedited migration of certain application assets to the cloud. How will you proceed?
We talked in past posts about technology strategy. If you have one in place, this can help you convince the leadership that jumping too fast to a new platform can be detrimental to the organization.
You have not retooled your processes or retrained your staff, and you certainly don’t know the impact on the business by moving too quickly. What about contact center support?
In our technology strategy we have the following step:
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.
By clearly defining what the target environment should look like – to support the business goals – you will have an idea for the training needs of the organization. You should also begin to understand the costs of such a move, and the impacts on how the business operates today.
Manage expectations
Operating without a well-thought-out strategy exposes technology leaders to inherent vulnerabilities.
You will not only have a difficult time maintaining the target platform because you won’t have the correct skills, but you’ll also need to support the current platform because you’ll need overlap… assuming you can even move everything. Don’t underestimate the cost to train your people and support your technology environments.
If you are re-platforming (just moving) applications from on-site to the cloud, you’ll find that they may not perform as well and need retrofitting, which is costly. This could also leave you with technical debt, such as back versions of software, and systems components that could be eliminated before a cloud move.
In general, transitioning your cloud (or any platform) may result in increased expenses for the company and potential job loss. Ultimately, it is crucial to leverage your strategy when considering technology shifts to ensure comprehensive planning and mitigate risks effectively.
In a prior post we discussed the important topic of building a strategy. As a tech executive, it’s crucial to not only develop but also deeply understand your strategy, even if a specialized team is creating it for you. This understanding allows you to direct the project’s course effectively and make informed decisions. A fundamental element of any project, including strategy development, is the project charter. The project charter is a guide outlining objectives, scope, and stakeholders, ensuring everyone is aligned and focused on the same goals.
The Project Charter Comprises:
Objectives: Clearly define the project’s primary purpose and its overarching goals. Identify previous work, research, or experiences that can boost the project’s success and explain how to integrate them into the current strategy.
Critical Success Factors: Establish the rules of engagement, including key performance indicators and measures of success. Identify the key conditions, resources, and support needed for the strategy’s success, highlighting the importance of stakeholder involvement and commitment.
Scope: Clearly delimit the range of activities and coverage that the strategy will encompass. Focus on identifying specific deliverables and processes, while utilizing existing data and capabilities to refine these elements. This ensures alignment with the project’s objectives and resource availability.
Governance: Outline the detailed planning process, including the team structure, roles, and responsibilities. Describe the collaboration, communication, and decision-making methods used for effective planning and execution, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Methodology: Document the framework that will guide the project from inception to completion. Specify the steps, phases, and milestones to achieve success, highlighting best practices or industry standards to follow throughout the project.
Deliverables: Clearly describe the expected deliverables, including their characteristics, quality standards, and intended outcomes. Explain how these deliverables connect to the methodology and processes, ensuring each aligns with the project’s goals.
Timeline: Provide a comprehensive timeline that details the project’s phases, key milestones, dependencies, and durations. Explain the scheduling rationale, highlighting critical paths and timing risks, to ensure stakeholders understand the activity sequence and timing.
The charter helps manage expectations by clearly outlining the objectives, roles, and responsibilities of everyone involved.
The charter is an excellent collaborative document for all stakeholders, serving as a reference point to ensure alignment. By developing a shared vision as a team, members can contribute their expertise, significantly enhancing the chances of success. This collective understanding helps to prevent misunderstandings and fosters a sense of unity and commitment toward the project’s goals.
As a tech executive, crafting a well-defined technology strategy is crucial for supporting the IT direction within your organization. This strategy helps gain consensus on budget allocation and focuses effort by aligning technology initiatives with business priorities. It serves as a roadmap that guides decision-making and resource allocation, ensuring that every technological advancement supports the overarching goals of the business.
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, staying ahead of the technological curve is not just advantageous but necessary. By utilizing emerging tools and resources, companies can drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and foster sustainable growth. This proactive approach allows organizations to not only adapt to changes but also to anticipate and leverage them for competitive advantage.
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.
Conclusion
Developing a comprehensive technology strategy is essential for any tech executive looking to lead effectively in today’s fast-paced digital world. Establishing a robust framework from the outset is crucial, as it lays the foundation for future growth and stability. Maintaining this framework requires continuous assessment and adaptation to new challenges and opportunities.
As a tech executive, you must be adept at navigating the constantly evolving technology landscapes, ensuring that your company not only keeps up with current trends but also stays ahead of the curve. This involves developing a deep understanding of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, and assessing their potential impact on your industry. By anticipating shifts in the technological horizon, you can strategically position your company to capitalize on new advancements, ensuring long-term success and relevance in a competitive marketplace.
