Too often I find companies that love to adopt whatever the sexist tech is today. There can be a strong tendency towards shiny-thing-syndrome in what new technologies are adopted.
Or, on the other hand, there hasn’t been a change in stack for a long time, and we now want to overhaul everything and anything all at once. Unfortunately, this creates a limited view from two extremes. All modernization approaches should be deliberate responses to business challenges.
You should already be experiencing a little pain!
If you look at some legacy industries you find interesting examples of strategic modernization decisions.
Recently, L&G Energy used an acquisition as the impetus to put in place a modern ETL with WhereScape. They were caught in the common situation of having endless volumes of data, but very little useful information from the data. Choosing a simple tool to manage this data is a clear example of modernizing with purpose–making more effective business solutions with the data you already have.
Before jumping the gun on any change in your tech stack, you need to qualify the value proposition of the change with so-called “value modes”.
Questions to filter the noise:
- How does it improve processes?
- Does it improve our competitive position?
- Does this allow better integration of data and analytics into products (informationalization)?
- Will this allow for new and improved products?
- Does this improve or augment human capabilities?
- Does it improve risk management?
Regardless of direction of tech adoption, all technology decisions are business decisions. Every spend should offer improvements or revenue-generating opportunities.
-jm