A strategy lays out a roadmap into the future, based on the past and present. In this piece, we’ll explore how you can create an effective technology strategy that empowers your business to grow profitably.
In our last piece in this four-part series, we showcased a range of ways that technology can be used to drive value to inspire ideas for your business. In this piece, we explain how to map your current technology territory, craft an implementable future vision for enhancing value using technology in your business, and how to bridge the gap between the present and the future with effective planning and implementation.
Mapping Your Technology Territory
By knowing your territory, you can see where there are technological gaps, risks and opportunities across your business, giving material that can be harnessed for your strategy. To do this well, a holistic survey of the technology and processes in your business will be crucial.
Before assessing the technology itself, you’ll need to map it and evaluate its maturity by conducting a technology inventory, encompassing the hardware, software, applications and systems that are being used in your business. You can use interviews, surveys, or documentation to establish your technology inventory in its breadth and depth, as well as break down the functions that they have in your business processes.
After conducting a technology inventory, you can use a Technology Capability Maturity Model (CMM) to assess it. CMM is a framework for evaluating processes and the technologies involved in them to determine their effectiveness. This framework can be applied with a range of variables, including connectivity levels, compliance indicators, and time: a crucial element for driving value.
Finally, you can map your technology against your business processes by using a business process mapping tool or by creating documentation of your own. This gives a clear, step-by-step picture of how your technology is impacting your workflows and the outcomes that they create.
After mapping your technology, its maturity, and the impact it has on your processes, you’ll have a clear picture of how it can be changed to create more profitable value. To do this in a coordinated and effective way, you’ll need to create a vision-driven technology strategy.
Creating Your Technology Strategy
Your strategy will serve as a rocket that propels your business from the status quo towards your envisioned future, provided it is realistic and well-conceived.
Firstly, begin by defining your goals and aims for your technology strategy. You can use a framework such as SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time-bound) to structure these goals into concrete steps, which in turn will enable you to structure your technology roadmap for implementing new technologies in your business in a prioritised, value-focused way.
There are two more steps after this, the first is conducting a technology landscape assessment, which involves identifying potential tools and technologies that can be used to take your technology inventory to the next level across your business. This will give you an idea of new and alternative solutions that can add value to your business, as well as which ones should be prioritised.
The final step for creating your technology strategy, is to develop a technology roadmap, which can be structured using project management tools and software. This roadmap consolidates your findings into an practicable plan that gradually introduces new technologies and infrastructure into your business to drive value.
To develop a technology roadmap, you can break it down by these key elements:
- Identify and prioritise your key projects: projects are the pieces of your strategy that bring it to life. This can include adopting new software, upgrading new hardware, and introducing new automations for example. Once you have identified your key projects, you can prioritise them based on urgency, dependencies on the roadmap, and the value they can deliver.
- Define Milestones and Timelines: In this step, you organize your projects across time on your roadmap, establishing key milestones and timelines that fit with the goals of your IT strategy. This enables your business to track its progress against time and milestone-based measurements.
- Allocate Resources: Allocate people, budgets and infrastructure to your projects in alignment with your overall IT strategy resourcing. Take care to align these elements with the requirements, milestones and timelines of each project.
- Address Risks: For each project, identify the risks involved, which could include disruptions to work or loss of data. Factor these risks into the project plans to mitigate them successfully.
- Identify Stakeholders and create a communication plan: To successfully implement your projects, ensuring continuous alignment and communication between relevant stakeholders will be essential from the start. For each project, identify the stakeholders and how communications will be implemented with them across the project to ensure a smoother implementation process. The sooner this is done in the context of your overall IT strategy and projects, the better.
- Continuous Review: set up regular reviews for your projects and IT strategy more generally to keep a handle on their progress and to adjust them as needed. Continuous review and communication of changes keeps stakeholders aligned and updated, lowering potential friction, misunderstandings and disruptions.
With your strategy setup, you will be better placed to implement it with clarity and confidence. We hope that you found this piece useful for creating a technology strategy that can drive growth and new opportunities for your business. In our next blog in this series, we will continue moving into the practicalities of leveraging technology to drive value, by exploring how to identify the most promising technological solutions for your business.
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