Technology is at the core of innovation for new business models; products, services, experiences; enabling workers and increasing productivity; growing sales and market share. Businesses need to offer these experiences to customers as quickly as they expect – which calls for a new operating model that reconsiders IT in relation to business needs.
IT company in Calgary must be agile and responsive to meet the demands of the business.
Strategic Planning
Building an IT strategy that helps meet your business goals requires several strategic planning processes. These involve selecting the most beneficial technologies, creating a technology roadmap with associated costs, and then devising an IT implementation strategy involving development, migration, setup and adoption.
Beginning a strategic planning process requires creating an inspiring vision for your company that provides clear direction. This vision should consider your current strengths and weaknesses, customer insights, market data and industry information.
Next, identify the objectives that will enable you to reach your long-term strategic goals. A strategy map is an effective way of organizing goals into four categories – financial, customer, internal business processes (IBPs) and learning and growth. By creating relationships and dependencies among these goals, stakeholders can understand how their actions contribute towards meeting overall business needs. Finally, develop an action plan for accomplishing each of your goals within an agreed upon timeline.
Technology Assessment
An IT assessment provides insight into your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to meet the mission of your organization with current tech solutions. An IT evaluation also allows you to identify and address lingering technical debt; align your tech stack with goals and strategy by surveying staff members, stakeholders, or customers on how satisfied they are with existing tech; identify areas for improvements; manage technical debt lingering lingering debt.
Technology assessment (TA) is a form of policy research that examines both short and long-term impacts of technology on society. This can take many forms depending on where TA takes place – from private firms (‘picking the winners’ TA), sectors and government agencies (such as cost/benefit risk analysis in healthcare), governments/representative bodies (public service TA, with examples such as US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment being an early one), to governments/representative bodies/state institutions (such as US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment being an early example).
Best IT assessments draw upon various sources for inputs. These may include desk review and consultation, conducting a societal impact analysis, proposing alternatives, and organizing a validation workshop.
Technology Selection
As few new business models or innovations can survive without some sort of IT foundation, IT departments will transition from being strictly siloed structures into customer-focused organizations with multiple teams dedicated to customer support. Therefore, IT teams must have representation and voice when developing corporate strategy.
When selectinging technology solutions, it’s essential that all stakeholders – IT leaders, application development specialists, core coding and testing specialists as well as business stakeholders – participate. Involvement by business stakeholders ensures a more holistic approach and alignment with business goals and objectives.
A successful selection process should include well-define functional requirements and use cases that serve to eliminate politics, biases, and compromises that often impede technology decision making. Finally, every project should include a budgetary component with clear cost estimates for implementation in order to prevent unexpected expenses that could damage investment value.
Technology Implementation
Once your long-term business objectives have been established, the next step should be developing an IT strategy to support them. This IT strategy development must take account of an in-depth evaluation of your current IT infrastructure – its strengths, weaknesses and opportunities – which should form part of this analysis.
These insights should be combined with data about current and emerging technology trends to shape an IT strategy that clearly shows how you will meet its goals with limited resources available.
Implementation requires careful coordination between development and user organizations. As a result, prioritizing development of new features that can be made available to business units after each phase is often necessary.
Assembling and communicating clear functional goals to all parties involved will make the task simpler, and employees should know in advance what changes are taking place and their impact on daily work processes so they can anticipate any interruptions or delays in advance.
