Forget tech strategy: Business strategy is what matters

You bought a new smartphone and picked up a tablet — now what? Lots of people are talking about what is the next big thing. It isn’t just in mobile, either. People are asking the same question about big data, cloud, and networking. Notions abound everywhere you look on what’s next and where everything is going. But all you’re trying to do is figure out your next purchase and how to make your life a little easier at work.

The issue with trying to figure out what’s next is that few organizations actually know where they are or where they’re going with technology. They keep chasing buzzwords and building strategies around them. Chances are you can open up a Computerworld or CIO magazine, and you will see all sorts of stories about creating a mobile strategy, a cloud strategy, networking/SDN strategy (yes, software-defined networking is the “next big thing” in networking), and most certainly a big data strategy. Heck, I participated in a conversation this week where the first question asked was what sort of analytics should you be running against your big data.

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Having all these strategies is very nice, but to be truthful, they’re completely worthless. You don’t need any of them. What you need is a business strategy. You then fit all these technology pieces into your business strategy.

Your business strategy should be about how you create value for the company. It may be acquiring new customers; it may be selling more to your current customers or reaching them faster. You may have one overarching business strategy, then more specific ones for different business units because they do different things.

It all comes down to creating value. Technology is just a way for you to achieve or increase that value faster. Different technologies fit in different ways. If you want to build technology strategies, that’s fine — but build them so that they fit the business strategy.

For example, if you take a look at mobile, you have to figure out the best way to bring that business value out. It’s not a question of what’s next for BYOD (bring your own device) or COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled). Although many people don’t like to admit it, those issues are focused around ownership. They don’t address how to get value from mobile technology.

We’ve spent the last 14 years dealing with putting email, calendar, and contacts on devices. It started with the BlackBerry and eventually mushroomed with the iPhone, then Android. As we move forward, such email, calendar, and contacts access isn’t even table stakes anymore. The value of people being able to respond to email anytime, anywhere is easy to figure out.

The real question is how do you enable your users and your customers. It’s no longer a question of whether they have a mobile device, it’s just a question of whether they can use it to do their jobs better. When your goal is enable your user to become more flexible and agile, in the process of becoming more productive and efficient, you aren’t talking about just email anymore.

When you get out of ownership thinking and into enablement thinking, you start to focus on what your users are actually doing. What are their needs? I refer to it as the FUN principle: Focus on user needs.

You start with the business requirements. Look at the current business processes and figure out where mobile can play to make them easier and more efficient. Is it more efficient to be able to enter the clinical data into the computer while talking to the patient, or is it better to use a clipboard and enter the information into a PC later? Does it make sense for your pilots to be carrying around 20 pounds of manuals when they can carry a 1.5-pound device that has all the same manuals and be updated dynamically? Should your construction workers be able to use augmented reality to see where the wire and conduits in a building are, or should they carry around a role of blueprints they have to unroll at every floor?

The future of mobile (and really every other technology) is the ability to make it part of your current business ecosystem. Your goal is to give your users and customers the best tools that you can. You build apps for those devices; they then become the tools of the trade. It’s great that you have a tip calculator app on your mobile device, but if you can’t do your expenses when you spend work’s money, how did you really provide a tool?

When the mix of devices and apps provide the tools for secure access to the corporate ecosystem, you know you have succeeded. When your users can do that conference call from wherever they are, watching the presentation on their tablet, take a picture of that receipt and submit it, enter the clinical data as soon as they receive it patient-side, or do any other process that is part of your business, you know you have found the next thing.

This article, “Forget tech strategy: Business strategy is what matters,” originally appeared at A Screw’s Loose and is republished at InfoWorld.com with permission (© Brian Katz). Read more of Brian Katz’s The Squeaky Wheel blog at InfoWorld.com or at A Screw’s Loose. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.