Editorial
The Gist
- Embrace change. Businesses must prioritize sustainability in their tech investments to provide enduring value in a dynamic world.
- Flexibility is key. Seek technologies that offer long-term adaptability, easy integration and portability to stay nimble in the face of change.
- Secure your assets. Security, stability and compliance are paramount to protect your investment and customer data.
In Gartner’s 2024 strategic technology trends report, one theme came through loud and clear: Your business needs to be positioned to withstand change. The report advises leaders on how to “ensure sustained impact from your technology investments” — and the concept of “sustainability” is fundamental to that call to action.
Sustainability isn’t just about going green anymore. It’s about providing enduring value in a changing world. Let's take a look at some concepts to think about when it comes to making strategic technology investments.
Every organization needs to prepare for change, whether or not it’s expressly dedicated to an environmental, social or governance purpose. Here are four questions you should ask to make sure your tech investments can sustain the value of your business for the long haul.
4 Questions to ask about Your Strategic Technology Investments
1. Do Your Technology Investments Prioritize Long-Term Flexibility?
If your organization wants to provide sustained value, it needs to be nimble. That’s difficult when you’re locked into technology that takes weeks, months, or even years to adapt or change.
Dreaded Re-Platforming
If you’ve ever mentioned the word “re-platform” to a member of your IT team, they probably responded with a look of dread. That’s because historically, upgrading your technology stack requires years of switching systems, building custom code and fixing things that break.
Change Should Be Easier
Change shouldn’t be so hard. When you’re considering new strategic technology investments, don’t just think about your current requirements, which are inevitably going to change along with your company and the world around you. Look for tools that can help you keep up.
Flexibility Is Key
Technology should make flexibility easy across your stack. You want it to easily plug into other systems, built by companies that aren’t afraid to work with others to deliver what their customers need.
Portability
Don’t forget about portability. Vendors should play nicely even if you terminate your relationship. Any product you purchase should make it easy to migrate to a replacement.
Related Article: Top AI Customer Experience Investments With Big Payoffs
2. Are Vendors Prepared to Protect Your Technology Investment?
Gartner points out that sustainability, security and stability go hand in hand. Your technology should protect your data and maintain operations to ensure you can stay focused on delivering value for your customers.
Technology Security
Work with your information security and legal teams to determine your requirements for security and choose technology that meets your needs. At a basic level, this means making sure they can handle the basic requirements that your industry or region requires, such as PCI DSS compliance for payment data or GDPR for companies that handle personal data in the EU.
Check Vendor Performance
Look for vendors that make it easy to learn about their security practices and operational stability. For example, choose companies that maintain a public-facing status page and provide detailed postmortems following outages. Even better, in times of high traffic and demand (like Black Friday), see if you can find a track record of their performance. Do they maintain a reliable uptime metric, or do you find a record of complaints and questions?
Related Article: Martech Stack Underutilization Is a Big Problem
3. Will Your Technology Vendors Continue to Innovate?
Your technology vendors should continuously deliver new features that address your industry’s evolving needs.
Well-Staffed Engineering Departments
Look for those with well-staffed engineering departments that can rapidly adopt emerging technologies. The rise of generative AI is a great example of why this is important: Many companies have reaped the benefits through vendors that quickly delivered new capabilities built on technologies like ChatGPT.
(Of course, product updates shouldn’t depend solely on the underlying technology landscape. Vendors should have a strong track record of delivering meaningful product updates regularly.)
Customer Engagement for Roadmaps
You should also look for vendors that engage their customers in developing product roadmaps. The best partners actively seek insights from customers, whether informally in conversation with customer success managers or formally through surveys or customer advisory boards. You are the expert on what your business and the industry need from technology — so look for a company that seeks your input.
Related Article: How to Maximize Your Return on Technology Investment
4. How Long Will It Take to See Value?
That look of dread on IT’s faces when we talk about a “re-platform” isn’t just about effort — it’s about knowing that it might be months or years before the organization sees value from technology again.
Rapid Implementation and Benefits
Your organization should be able to quickly realize value from new strategic technology investments. Gone are the days of spending months implementing a system that takes years to provide tangible benefits to business users. Today, cloud-native, API-first technologies can easily integrate into an existing stack. It’s just a matter of prioritizing rapid implementation in your procurement process.
Fast Pace of Change
This is especially important in the context of sustaining your business in a changing world. If you have an urgent need for a new capability, you can’t wait around for an antiquated tool that isn’t built for the modern era to be installed and configured.
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Sustainable Tech Investments Rely on High Standards
Prioritizing sustainability in your strategic technology investments allows you to preserve and increase the value you provide to your customers. Don’t settle for anything less than the flexibility, stability, and innovation you need to survive in today’s unpredictable world.
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