Speaking as a relatively non-technical person, I have certain expectations of technology. I expect that my email client will work smoothly, my internet browser will let me do what I want, and that my media player will let me play all the music I want, when I want. I don’t expect to have to modify my behaviour to suit the applications I use – I expect them to enable me to do the things I need to do. Once I find myself spending more time on tending to the application itself than on genuine productivity, we know something’s gone awry.
This is the point at which two things happen. Firstly, technology becomes a barrier to progress. Secondly, my experience becomes defined by the tools I use, rather than those tools serving to enable me to do what I need to do.
We see this system at work at both micro and macro levels. In microcosm, it’s when I link an Excel document to a Powerpoint deck, only to discover that it renders both files fundamentally unusable, or when I find that my ‘smartphone’ actually prevents me from making or receiving calls. Macro examples of this reversal of priorities can be seen when a business is governed by its technology choices, rather than the natural order of things being followed. Whilst the former are time-consuming irritants, the latter can be a multi-million pound black hole of missed opportunities and drained resource.
Let’s look, for example, at a fictional ecommerce marketing manager. The platform they’re using is perhaps a few years old, it’s a hosted service and they’re locked into their vendor’s development roadmap. They know that their more agile, flexible competitors are returning around 8-10% of their business from their affiliate sale programs, but due to the limitations of the platform, they’re unable to provide the necessary product feeds to support such a program. Requests to the vendor for the required functionality return little in the way of committed timescales; these guys are probably running at 100% capacity just trying to support the application across numerous other instances. So the upshot is that the business in question misses an opportunity which could boost sales by as much as 10% in the first year with little or no investment.
So how do these things happen? How and when does technology cease to be a tool, and becomes a mitigating factor which defines a business’ future, for better or worse? Quite simply, it’s when a business loses sight and understanding of its over-arching strategic objectives, and ceases to properly articulate them in its requirements of technology.
Let’s break that statement down into the component parts. Firstly, losing sight of strategic objectives. By this I mean the strategic goals which need to be in place to govern every decision taken by a business at every level . If every commercial deal is done with the aim of supporting this strategy, so every technology implementation needs to do so as well. Effective communication of whatever this strategy is should ensure every business unit, including IT, is in line: if we share and understand a common goal, we can jointly come to a solution which works towards that goal.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly: properly articulating those objectives in requirements. There are two sides to this; from the perspective of the business, it’s about ensuring that the requirements of a proposed technology solution are defined in detail, in abstraction from the technology itself. By this I mean not trying to second-guess the actual solution, but instead defining the needs of users and the business in such a way that the technology can be designed to attend to those needs. Not the other way around.
From the perspective of the IT and technology delivery functions, it’s about understanding not only the over-arching strategy both now and into the future, but how the requirements are geared to supporting it. Understanding the context of what you’re about to build will give you clarity on where the value lies on what you’re doing, and a vision of future requirements, however fuzzy, will help set your expectations of the level of flexibility which will be required.
The most crucial thing to remember throughout this process, on both sides of the fence, is that technology is a tool, something which should enable and drive business operations. Once this tool ceases to do those things in a cost-effective, productive manner, it’s time to get a new one.
In previous lives I've worked in a variety of marketing and ecommerce roles for brands such as Oddbins, Woolworths and Virgin. I'm now working with Conchango as a consultant on the Retail team.