10 Ways a Strategic Technology Roadmap Helps You Emerge Stronger

Help mitigate distraction from the shiny new buzzwords that proliferate in the IT industry with these key insights. This article outlines better strategies for effective evaluation, adoption, and deployment of the right business technology.

In this article, you will learn how to:

• Avoid misalignment of technology with business processes
• Apply the 10 essential elements of a Strategic Technology Roadmap
• Build a clear and achievable path to emerge stronger from COVID-19, in 2022 and beyond

Content Summary

Foreword
Introduction
Identify technologies best suited to transform
Ensure technology aligns with long-term objectives
Develop a platform for innovation
Optimised security and reduced risk
Improved productivity and cost efficiencies
Faster, more sustainable growth
Agility
Manageability
Resilience
Improved value from service providers

Discover better strategies for effective evaluation, adoption, and deployment of the right business technology.

Amid a rapidly changing business climate, and with modern tools and services making it far too easy to adopt poor solutions, the utilisation of expert consulting services is more important than ever.

Having a good Strategic Technology Roadmap in place will improve operations and reduce costs, but will also establish a platform for resilience, growth and innovation. All the things you need to emerge stronger in 2022 and beyond.

Foreword

When it comes to making effective use of business technology, it’s all too easy to find yourself distracted by the latest shiny new thing. Buzzwords such as “digital transformation”, “intelligent automation” and “connected business” appear full of promise offering unlimited potential to reshape operations.

All too often, ineffective adoption resulting in the misalignment of technology with business processes and outcomes is followed by long-term disappointment.

As a result, many business leaders find themselves unsure of the direction in which to head and they remain uncertain of the answers to their key questions: of all the technologies available, which ones do I need to focus on, and which will quickly fade from view? Of the business ready and tangible options available, which deliver the quantifiable benefits being sought? And how do they need to be implemented to deliver the outcomes I require?

To provide insight into the processes required to make these decisions, this white paper introduces the ten essential elements of a Strategic Technology Roadmap.

These are the steps you need to take to future-proof your organisation. Tecala’s approach to developing its Strategic Technology Roadmaps is built around our unique client engagement methodology that comprises four pillars: Strategise, Transform, Manage and Optimise. You may, however, have your own approach in mind, in which case this white paper can be used to compare the most effective route towards the right outcome.

By leveraging a Strategic Technology Roadmap that is formulated in collaboration with a team of experts, you will gain perspective on the challenges you face, allowing you and your team to reach a range of important business goals. Despite being faced with ongoing disruptions and upheaval caused by COVID-19, you will have a clear and achievable path that will enable you to emerge stronger from the pandemic.

2022 will be all about performance, agility, and being resilient enough to compete in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

Introduction

Amid a rapidly changing business climate, and with modern tools and services making it far too easy to adopt poor solutions, the utilisation of expert consulting services is more important than ever.

This article, 10 Ways a Strategic Technology Roadmap Helps You Emerge Stronger, outlines new and better strategies for effective evaluation, adoption and deployment of business technology.

Having a good Strategic Technology Roadmap in place will improve operations and reduce costs, but will also establish a platform for resilience, growth and innovation. All the things you need to emerge stronger in 2022 and beyond.

Are you always being driven by the latest tech flavour, or are you getting distracted by digital transformation buzzwords? In this guide we enable you to look beyond themes and concepts, and to get down to the business essentials of what technology needs to enable for you and your business.

The article outlines an approach that will ensure the tools and services selected deliver true business value and align with long-term corporate goals, and how future-facing organisations will emerge stronger in the new economy, including:

Creating a winning strategy through the right approach to ICT advisory and consultancy services.

Developing a clear understanding of your business, your clients, and your business-critical outcomes to start identifying which technologies are best suited to transform and continually innovate.

Aiming for complete flexibility, agility and adaptability so you can scale in real time to changing operational environments.

How outcomes that start with a Strategic Technology Roadmap will allow you to move forward and innovate with more certainty, more confidence and no more surprises.

According to Gartner’s research, the top three attributes which set “fit” enterprises apart are all dependent on IT. These are: IT as a differentiator; effective leadership; and clear strategy.

At Tecala we believe in transforming organisations to become more resilient. This means helping them be prepared for change and enabling them to respond to, and then dominate, new markets faster than their competitors.

We do this by partnering and collaborating with the management team to ensure technology strategy is aligned with business objectives. And we achieve this through a Strategic Technology Roadmap.

With this roadmap in place, your organisation will be able to escape the shackles of being driven by themes and concepts, and to focus on the essentials of how technology can genuinely enable your business strategy

Identify technologies best suited to transform

Keeping up with the plethora of emerging technologies is challenging and deciding which are best for your transformation, and ongoing business resilience can be even more difficult. A Strategic Technology Roadmap helps identify technologies best suited to transform your organisation and this is what makes the selection of a technology consulting and advisory partner so important.

To be effective, a partner will strive to gain a clear understanding of your business, your clients, and your business-critical goals. Only then can they begin to identify which technologies are best suited to continue your transformation program.

Armed with this knowledge, an effective advisory partner will create a roadmap that details which technologies should be considered and the resulting quantifiable benefits that will be achieved.

Ensure technology aligns with long-term objectives

It is important to understand a Strategic Technology Roadmap is all about matching technology with business objectives, and not just technology itself.

Considering the current uncertain economic conditions, it has never been more important to ensure that your technology roadmap is preparing your organisation to be stronger going forward.

To be successful, your business needs a dynamic and experienced consulting and advisory partner to assist with harnessing leading-edge technologies. Such a partner can ensure you are able to respond to new operational challenges with agility and confidence.

Develop a platform for innovation

The term “innovation” is a favourite of technologists throughout the world. They eagerly talk up the prospects of how their offering can help organisations innovate and swiftly take advantage of new opportunities.

As enticing as innovation sounds when used in a presentation or product pitch, it can only ever deliver true business value when it is servicing the business needs. This alignment is critical from the outset to ensure the correct tools and services are deployed, used appropriately, and maintained.

Once formulated and in place, a Strategic Technology Roadmap will allow you to move forward and innovate with more certainty, more confidence and with no more technology disappointments.

Optimised security and reduced risk

Robust protection measures should be put in place no matter the industry. The security outcomes Tecala deliver are carefully developed to defend your business from the ubiquitous nature of cyber-security threats, business risk and natural disaster.

In the era of remote working and cloud applications, optimised security and risk management are imperative outcomes of any consulting and strategy engagement.

A prudent technology strategy roadmap will ensure robust protective measures are in place and functional throughout the organisation. With the threat landscape changing rapidly, keeping these measures up-to-date is critical and will form part of the portfolio of support delivered by your chosen consulting partner.

Tecala achieved this with the leading property development and construction group, St Hilliers. As part of a comprehensive IT transformation project, the company deployed a managed security service and a cloud security access broker (CASB) that, together, significantly improved the detection and management of security risks.

Improved productivity and cost efficiencies

Through selection of the most appropriate technologies for your organisation, and effective deployment and management by your chosen partner, the resulting Strategic Technology Roadmap will achieve a measurable return on investment through significantly improved productivity and lower operational costs.

A successful ICT deployment delivers a measurable ROI aligned with your business and technology objectives, which then results in greater productivity and efficiency.

The modern workplace has changed forever, and productivity and efficiency take on new dimensions with blended work from home and office environments. A better roadmap will guide your workplace to be configured to set you on your way to an agile, flexible, secure and productive platform.

Faster, more sustainable growth

With a reliable technology infrastructure in place, your organisation will be much better positioned for rapid and sustainable growth. New opportunities identified within a Strategic Technology Roadmap can be swiftly pursued allowing long-term corporate goals to be achieved and even surpassed.

It will enable you to scale rapidly and sustainably, with reliable infrastructure in place to support your objectives as you grow. Equip yourselves with the tools to excel at client service and stay ahead of your competitors.

Future growth will depend on turning collaboration into action and a strategic roadmap will include the various tactics available to make it happen.

Agility

A strategic roadmap will also help enable agility and speed throughout the business. Change is inevitable, and it can be taken advantage of by forward-thinking businesses. By acknowledging change with the right partner, you can respond to new operational challenges with speed and confidence.

With the current uncertain business conditions likely to continue for some time, ongoing change is inevitable. However, rather than being viewed entirely negatively, it can be taken as an opportunity for driving competitive advantage.

Tecala helped leading Australian research and support organisation, the National Breast Cancer Foundation achieve an agile environment. During the past 12 months, NBCF shifted from an ageing, in-house IT infrastructure to one that is based on cloud platforms. The result – a significant boost in staff productivity and the ability to continue to function during times of considerable disruption, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Manageability

In a world of increasingly distributed applications and systems, a Strategic Technology Roadmap will help make IT more manageable by including services you do need and removing those that you do not. A strategic roadmap can create a path to consolidating multiple disparate applications and taking advantage of better management tools to control the information lifecycle.

From IoT to Cloud – today’s IT architecture is more complex than ever and the options available are growing more by the day.

With a modern management architecture, new devices can be deployed easily, efficiently, and securely by automated enrollment and configuration using a single login, via mobile device management (MDM) software. This enables you to roll out end user computing technology and add staff with ease.

A capable MSP will have a handle on application deployment management, including delivery of ubiquitous endpoint management tooling. In the case of Microsoft 365, there are options to improve adoption of services and applications among staff to maximise the return from your license investments.

This approach also extends to security management and awareness. Modern management will ensure secure platform access in a multi-cloud environment, including Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions and firewall-level security improvement.

And don’t forget about user experience. More than ever, the new workplace relies on an intuitive user experience to drive efficiency and productivity. IT manager should be remote coordinators, to drive efficiencies and vastly improve individual user experiences.

This, together with education and training, will help maximise security awareness, combat shadow IT and enhance employee satisfaction.

Resilience

As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, resilience should be core to every business, and not just an option only called upon when needed.

An organisation’s health can be disrupted by a multitude of factors – from a local transport strike to a global pandemic. Organisations that weather the storm best have a Business Continuity Plan in place as part of their Strategic Technology Roadmap, which will give them an ability to continue operations even under the most trying circumstances.

Better resilience is also important for the modern workplace and remote working. An MSP can help design scalable and resilient remote working solutions, that enable the business to operate in the event of a disruption and with less fragility.

Improved resilience through a technology roadmap will support your growth and ensure end-user devices are always protected.

Improved value from service providers

Finally, but certainly of significant importance, is how a Strategic Technology Roadmap will help you get the most out of service providers.

A roadmap should identify which services should be managed, and by who – between your in-house IT teams and your service provider – to ensure optimal utilisation. A good MSP will not be after a “quick buck” but will develop a strategy roadmap that includes the value provided from its services and others, including cloud.