One trait that successful businesses have in common, according to McKinsey’s article titled “The CEO’s new technology agenda,” is a flexible and scalable technology base. It enables their teams to satisfy their company needs and navigate through socioeconomic shifts with speed and efficiency. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that businesses need to be nimble, quick, and efficient to endure and prosper in unpredictable and changing times.
What is the framework for a CEO’s technology strategy?
A CEO’s Technology Strategy Framework provides a high-level overview of their present technology investments and capabilities in relation to many business aspects to the CEO and their senior leadership team. To ensure that technology serves as a business enabler, you can ensure that your technology requirements are well-balanced by using the Technology Strategy Framework. Overspending on technologies, redundancy, and inefficiency can result from the lack of a technology strategy framework.
Seven components make up a strong technology strategy framework: productivity, security, infrastructure, departmental apps, brand experience, core business application, insights, and automation. We compare the Framework to a house to help you visualise it and how the seven components are layered on top of one another (see the image below for an example).
The Seven Crucial Components of a Framework for Technology Strategy:
Security: Your technology strategy’s cornerstone before the main level of any house is constructed, is a strong foundation. Any contemporary technological framework must prioritise security as its primary component. Numerous examples exist that demonstrate the detrimental effects and consequences of undervaluing or neglecting security. News stories about incidents frequently make headlines, and Adwortech assists numerous organisations that frequently suffer from compromise.
When you make technology investment decisions, or when we recommend technology investments to a CEO and their C-suite, you want to ensure that the new technologies are secure by design and that they won’t add any new risks to your business. This is what it means to have security as the cornerstone of your technology strategy framework.
Infrastructure: Your IT home’s central rooms so that we reach the central rooms of the house with security as our base. We would refer to infrastructure as “traditional IT.” It covers everything—devices, internet, wifi, and your network. Its strategic significance has decreased, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer significant. We still need to make sure that your staff members have efficient workstations, strong networks, and connectivity so they can access all the apps they need to complete their tasks.
Departmental Applications: Increasing each department’s efficiency are the applications that are the technologies that are utilised by each of your departments; for example, your marketing team may use an accounting platform like QuickBooks, or your accounting team may utilise a marketing automation tool like Hubspot. You’ll be shocked at how many apps are being utilised in your company after you start loading this area with departmental applications.
It is imperative that we consider how to optimise these departmental applications. How can we buy an application for sales, marketing, finance, accounting, or any other purpose in such a strategic manner? Moreover, how can those different tools be smoothly integrated (if necessary) to guarantee effective data/information flow between departments? We should deliberately consider these before making a purchase.
Improving Employee and Customer Journeys through Brand Experience
The brand experience room is the next one. We advise chief executive officers and their C-suite counterparts to consider brand experience from two angles: the viewpoint of the customer and the viewpoint of the employee.
Employee Experience Perspective:
Some inquiries to make while considering the brand experience from an employee experience standpoint are as follows:
•Which resources are we using to help us recruit new staff members?
•What strategies are we employing to keep our current staff members?
•What resources are we utilising to help our current staff members develop and become the best versions of themselves?
•In an environment where many of us work remotely, how can we make these investments in a way that allows us to attract, retain, and grow our workforce?
Regardless of their circumstances, we want to make sure that we can democratise the employee experience. In order to attract more potential and current employees, we also hope to be able to digitise corporate culture. Through the internal lens of brand experience, all of this occurs.
A Viewpoint on Customer Experience
The consumer experience represents the brand experience from the outside. Among the inquiries to make are:
What are the ways in which your clients engage with your company? And do these exchanges have a favourable or unfavourable impact on their choice to work with you?
•Are the technological investments you’ve made making it easier for them to buy your goods or use your service?
•Does your technology facilitate a better customer experience for them as they move through your life cycle?
•Do you have any tools to facilitate communication with those current clients?
When making deliberate judgements about technology that will help us develop our current client base, draw in new ones, and keep the ones we already have, we need to keep these issues in mind. That represents the brand experience from the outside.
Productivity: Making use of tools to increase effectiveness and efficiency using productivity as a core. This room has every tool we utilise to continue being more productive and efficient. The productivity tools we utilised in the past were Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook email.
Many more tools are added to this room, such as e-signature tools, workflow tools, incident management tools, customer support tools, and so forth, because digital transformation is currently occurring in the majority of industries.
The essential application for business:
In our experience, businesses usually have one core application that serves as their main business tool. This may be your ERP or CRM, or it could be an application that helps you monetise your company or manage time if you run a service-based firm.
Strategic thinking is particularly crucial for this one crucial business application, thus we advise CEOs and their C-suite to consider the following questions:
Automation and Insights:
Automation and insights make up the roof of the Framework, which may be its most crucial component. This is what enables us to use the data we have and draw conclusions that are actionable. We can consider everything in this framework that is below the roof to be an asset.
Our ability to make better judgements will be aided by the data we collect from our customers, workers, and essential business systems. This data can be viewed as an asset, but just like any asset, it must be able to be activated in order to provide us with useful insights.
How to Start Creating Your Own Framework for a Technology Strategy
A brainstorming session has shown to be beneficial and indispensable for the CEOs and executive teams that we have worked with in developing their Technology Strategy Framework. To assist CEOs and C-suite executives in formulating a technology strategy framework, we created our Technology Roadmap Lite especially for them.
You will receive a customised Technology Strategy Framework for your company along with a ranking for each room depending on your present situation when you reserve your own Technology Roadmap Lite for CEOs. Along with proposed deadlines and expenditure requirements for each item, we’ll also present you a list of must-do, should-do, and could-do actions to enhance your technological architecture.
About The Author
