Creating Your Company's Technology Strategy

Is technology getting in your way rather than enabling success? One of the biggest mistakes we see in small businesses is going forward without a good technology strategy. What ends up happening is technology starts to create vulnerabilities and obstacles rather than enabling the team to achieve the desired business performance goals. That is why developing your company’s technology strategy needs to be part of your overall business strategy.

What Is A Technology Strategy?

A technology strategy is simply a plan to use technology to help your business achieve its performance goals. The strategy also includes plans for updates, training, personnel, and budgets. Your technology strategy will include these plans as well as the implementation tactics needed to carry them out and measure results.

Why A Technology Strategy Is Important

Leveraging technology will save your team time, help them make fewer mistakes, foster stronger customer relationships, and create stronger digital/data security.

It’s all about your business goals and objectives. Technology will help you achieve those. That makes it necessary to have a good plan and a system to measure the outcomes. Your business goals likely include staying ahead of your competition and keeping up with market changes. Technology is a vital part of that success.

There is a steady barrage of bad news around cybersecurity attacks these days, and technology is obviously at the center of that. Hackers try to exploit weak points in your technology to get access to your data. That’s another reason that having a good technology plan -- and sticking to it -- is so important to your business.

How To Prepare For Your Strategy Planning

Here is a quick summary of what you’ll need to do to prepare for your technology strategy session. For a deeper dive, complete our Technology Strategy Questionnaire.

1. Identify Your Goals and Objectives: Your goals and objectives will tie right into your overall business goals and objectives. In addition to that, identify your desired outcomes for your technology.
2. Assess Your Current Situation:
   1. Inventory Technology: Is your team working remotely? What software and platforms do you currently use? Will you update and/or replace any of these? How does data enter your systems and flow throughout?
   2. Security: What does your technology require in terms of planning. Think incident response or disclosure due to breach. What do you need to focus on in the next quarter, year, and long term?
   3. Processes: Document your workflows to ensure that your technology matches up with them and enables better efficiency.
   4. Team Feedback: Ask your team what ONE THING they’d like to see improved through technology. Ask them what challenges they have doing their jobs and communicating with each other.
3. Identify Challenges and Opportunities: Now is the time to make meaningful and lasting changes for your business. Take the time to identify current pain and challenges as well as potential opportunities for improvement. Ask yourself what processes can be automated to free up your team’s time.
4. Identify Your Stakeholders: Identify those who will use the technology, and also those who will benefit from it -- leadership, team members, vendors, suppliers, customers.
5. Create A Timeline and Budget: How much time and money do you have available to allocate to your technology? Working with a good technology consultant will help you identify both of these in a realistic scope.

These are all questions your technology consultant/leader will need answers to in order to craft your technology strategy. The answers will also determine areas of focus, potential costs, and desired outcomes.

Do You Know What You Don’t Know?

The scariest part of setting out on this path to creating a technology strategy is not knowing what you DON’T know. That’s why having a 3rd-party perspective is so vital.

The better you and your team -- including your technology consultant -- prepare before creating your technology strategy, the better your plan will be. Start by filling out this questionnaire. It will help you identify all aspects of your business and how you can best get ready for your strategy session. Then, reach out to Sol Minion to get help putting your strategy into practice.