Technology enabling your strategy
Posted by Grant Brewer on 30 Aug 2006
Hopefully by now your organisation has a good strategy that is focused around real business purpose instead of focusing on a flakey “vision statement”. If you’re doing a good job of strategy, then strategy in your organisation will be more than a few days away at the off-site and will have become a consistent and constant conversation through out the year. So this might be good time to extend your thinking to how technology can enable your strategy. Recent columns have considered the role of people in strategy execution in terms of customer service or in terms of leadership and ethics. Technology won’t replace the people or decrease the need to have an people-centric strategy, but it is a useful enabler of strategy.
Hopefully by now your organisation has a good strategy that is focused around real business purpose instead of focusing on a flakey “vision statement”. If you’re doing a good job of strategy, then strategy in your organisation will be more than a few days away at the off-site and will have become a consistent and constant conversation through out the year. So this might be good time to extend your thinking to how technology can enable your strategy. Recent columns have considered the role of people in strategy execution in terms of customer service or in terms of leadership and ethics. Technology won’t replace the people or decrease the need to have an people-centric strategy, but it is a useful enabler of strategy.
In some cases, technology and the internet in particular, could be the major focus of your strategy. This isn’t only true of large organisations. Indeed, the so-called long-tail effect of the internet (where many small members make up a large proportion of a population) makes it easier to be a small operation and still make an effective living through the internet. A recent example of revenue from Google’s AdSense demonstrated this: Markus Frind, who runs a free personal dating service on his internet site www.plentyoffish.com, received a cheque from Google for two months worth of advertising revenue totalling $1m and he runs a pretty small and simple business. But lets not get ahead of ourselves, because not everyone is making money out of Google AdSense. Instead, lets focus on some of the issues that you should consider when planning out your technology strategy.
Recognise the limitations of technology
Firstly, avoid the common technology traps.
- No technology of any type will solve all your business problems. Not ERP systems, nor the internet, nor productivity software. Despite what the sales people will say, your business depends on having a solid value proposition and not on having certain technology. There just are no silver bullets when it comes to business leadership.
- Similarly, technology should be responding to the needs of the business strategy. There are times when the technology is a vital part of a organisations’ operations or vision, but the business value should always take the lead. A common mistake, especially in high-tech areas such as the internet, is to put to much emphasis on the technology with a view that customers will buy simply because you built the technology.
- Technology strategy successfully supports the business when there is independent thought. Quite often, one finds organisations that simply follow the lead of others when considering their technology options. This is likely to lead to ineffective investment. Being caught up in the jargon that you hear at Gartner conferences or from the sales people will get you know where. You need to cut through the noise to see the technology simply for what it is – a way of performing a business process or of deliver a service.
- Managers sometimes feel that they don’t have a good understanding of the technology options available to them. Should they have knowledge management, do they need an ERP, what about collaborative group ware, should we have an open architecture… All of this is simply jargon. The good managers are not “sold” by the vendors. They make sure they understand the real business requirements. If, as a leader, no-one can explain why the technology is necessary in plain and simple language, then you probably don’t need the technology. Rather spend some time understand what you need, why you need it and how a particular platform will support you.
Some of the issues that managers should be exploring in order to become conversant with common technology issues are:
- What role the internet plays in your business. There are few organisations that can afford to ignore the internet completely. The web lowers many entry barriers and raises others. Operating the web means operating globally and that means your customer service needs to be consistent with the standards of the global internet.
- Learn about open-source. Firstly, it isn’t free – it just has a different licence model. It might be cheaper than the alternatives, but you still need to factor in the support costs and (sometimes) the risk of fewer vendors to support you. If you work in the public sector, you should be giving open-source a very detailed look because the high software costs to bring technology to the desktop throughout the public sector is not sustainable.
- Learn how applications are built today. The traditional step-by-step approach to developing technology applications is often not used our counter-productive. More recent techniques are iterative and conversational, and embrace the idea that the scope changes. Moving goal posts need to be managed, but they won’t go away. Today, many development teams deal with changing requirements by releasing many versions of their work over a period of time – get something in front of your users and see how they respond. This is true even for internal applications. Also, applications today can be built in a “loosely-coupled” manner where they are made up of components that can be developed and run somewhat independently. This enables agility and allows the technology to respond to a changing strategy.
Leaders need to understand strategy
Leaders today need to understand how to use technology in their organisations. They need to recognise that information technology is an important enabler of all aspects of strategy and not simply a transaction engine. Technology can empower knowledge workers, improve customer service and centricity by giving people the information and tools that enable them to make better decisions and have an understanding of their context. And these are the places where technology enables your people to effectively execute your strategy.
Technology enabling your strategy was published in Intelligence Magazine as Strategym #41 in September 2006.
Categories
Essays | Technology | Strategy | Intelligence Strategym
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implementation (10) | strategy (8) | technology traps (1) | technology (1) | enablement (1)
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