Tech Strategy

It’s a fairly simple idea, really: tech and strategy. Right?

Maybe…

Have you noticed how often people–primarily in business and often in a leadership or management position–just slap “strategic” onto the front of another term or “strategy” in the middle of a conversation? In most cases, what they’re really equating it to is the big picture or bird’s eye view. Anything that is “tactical” is just more minute or specific.

Now, that’s not to say that the big picture, especially in the context of business, isn’t an aspect of strategy, but…it’s more than that. Strategy is uncomfortable decisions, it’s trade-offs, it’s choosing to go down a path that is not so obviously correct.

For the purposes of this first issue, we won’t focus too much on strategy by itself (we’ll get back to that at another time). The point is that when we say “tech strategy”, we aren’t just throwing the term around. It’s deliberate.

The idea that this whole newsletter is predicated on is that business leaders should be more strategic–in the truest sense of the word–about the software and other digital tech that is added to their company’s stack. This means uncomfortable decisions, trade-offs, and risky paths.

Think about whenever you, your team, or your leadership “needs” a tech solution to fix a problem, enhance a process, or maybe just build on a system already in place. That solution could be a platform, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, or something built from scratch, but what variables are typically considered? Capabilities, features, size or scope of solution, time to implement, cost, ROI, etc.

Basically, more often than not, the decision boils down to some combination of these three things:

• How well does the solution do the job?

• How long will it take to implement?

• How much does it cost?

Our proposition, on the other hand, is this:

The solution doesn't matter anymore.

Now, when someone goes and makes a statement like that, it requires some clarification.

It’s important to understand first of all that we make that statement assuming scenarios where the problem is not some edge case out of left field. We are assuming the problem has at least one pre-fabricated or mostly built solution (i.e. software, modular platform, cloud application, etc.), rather than require something to be built from the ground up.

However, the landscape of digital products has progressed so much, that for almost every major problem or business function, there is a cornucopia of available options.

Let’s take the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market for instance. If you are employed at a fairly typical company that has a sales team, you may think of Monday.com, Hubspot CRM, Zoho CRM, or Pipedrive. Even if you’re not part of a typical company, almost everyone has heard of Salesforce (CRM is essentially their core product).

Here’s the thing: practically all of those CRMs do the same thing. They solve the same problems. They give you the same end functionality. In many cases, they actually end up costing the same (in the long run).

We could, of course, argue the advantages of each of those platforms until AI takes over the conversation and just tells us which one to use, but it begs the question…what is our North Star? The department head or director of IT will typically go down a path where they conduct a cost-benefit analysis or have each provider give demos and make sure the solutions meet baseline requirements.

These exercises make us feel better because the variables are measurable. They give us comfort because we feel like we’ve done the “due diligence”. But in the end, there will always end up being trade-offs, even if it comes down to “build from scratch” or pick the only prefabricated solution on the market.

So, what is the true deciding factor? This is where more business leaders and tech leaders and IT leaders should be asking this simple question:

“Does this fit into our tech strategy?”

It’s an uncomfortable question. Strategy is…squishy. Tech strategy is hard to prove and it’s difficult to estimate its return on investment. Nevertheless, we at The Technical Executive believe it could mean the difference between success and failure in the modern corporate era.

Over the course of this newsletter’s lifetime, we hope to give strategic technical analysis of other companies, offer insight through interviews, demonstrate how to form a tech strategy, even pull in other pieces like change management and digital transformation, but for now our focus is on the why. Over the next few months, we will be setting out to make the case for why tech strategy is so important, how it can have a positive impact on your business, and how it can maybe–just maybe–transform the way we think about building a business tech stack.