
Insights
Articles about Technology Strategy


What drives API marketplace success? A strong ecosystem.
Oct 11, 2022
Once you’ve decided to move to an API-first architecture model, it’s tempting to jump right in building APIs, selecting an API gateway service, and standing up an API marketplace. That all takes work and delivers progress — up to a point. But, as some companies find out too late, you can pour months into standing up a state-of-the-art composability framework without really getting to ROI. You could even be increasing your tech debt. To start solving real business problems, you’ll need more than fingers on the keyboard. You’ll need to start with an API ecosystem in mind. Envisioning an API ecosystem within your organization Your API gateway is middleware, not a complete solution. It’s designed to streamline microservices delivery, running in the background to make work faster, easier, and more secure for API developers. Adding an API marketplace can help, by providing more of a storefront approach to sourcing those connections. But you can’t just build APIs and hope the right people come find them. You’ll need to go beyond the technology layer and design an API ecosystem to derive strategic value from those tools. To ensure API gateway or API marketplace platforms reach their full potential, successful organizations put strategy first. As you think about designing a future state API ecosystem to work toward, consider: What business needs your internal and external customers (API and application developers) are trying to solve How your current business processes may be helping — or hindering — those objectives Where you might find opportunities to streamline, remove friction, and accelerate progress Shifting the technology mindset from product delivery to customer experience can dramatically elevate ROI from day one by changing the way you prioritize, design, and implement each component of your solution. Your API gateway and API marketplace are utilities; your API ecosystem is how your business culture uses those tools. Driving value to your API marketplace Moving from a customer experience mindset to effecting real change and boosting the ROI of your API marketplace comes down to processes. A full process audit can help you spot opportunities for growth. First, look for processes that currently rely on APIs or on systems ripe for modernization: Which processes currently rely on APIs? Which rely on aging or end-of-life legacy systems? How might the API marketplace support more rapid composability to streamline modernization of those systems? Next, consider your current development processes: How do our developers publish APIs today? Is the API gateway frictionless, or do developers have to think about it every time? How do others find and use published APIs? If others find the API, is it easy to understand how to use it? Is the API marketplace truly self-service, or do developers waste time hunting details to implement the component? How do we manage the API lifecycle to maximize the value of our API investments? Then, consider how to use your API ecosystem strategy to level up: Reduce friction for API providers and consumers Package API instructions and information in an easily accessible way Make it easy for users to search for and implement the right API or component for their needs Manage your API lifecycle from creation to retirement Whether your business is growing or you’re already a global enterprise, once you get your API gateway and marketplace tools implemented and automated in a way that makes sense for your users and the business problems they solve, you’ll start to see results. The turn-key ability to source, consume, and change APIs makes your API marketplace nearly infinitely scalable, and flexible to evolve along with your business. Finding the right partner For organizations with significant legacy architecture, change comes at a considerable cost. You can’t afford to miss the productivity and efficiency gains that an optimized API marketplace delivers. Whether you need help imagining an API ecosystem or bringing it to life, selecting the right API marketplace or building a custom API gateway, the right partner can bring experience and expertise to get you through the roadblocks. Fusion Alliance specializes in full-spectrum digital transformations — helping organizations around the world find the right technology to fit their business needs and evolve their processes to maximize the value of their technology investments. Learn more about our approach to building a composable enterprise >>

Time to retire your tech debt
Sep 28, 2022
Your grandpa wants his solution back Reality television is nearly 75 years old. Shortly after World War II ended, your great-grandparents may have watched Candid Camera on ABC. Nowadays, Survivor is on its 43rd season and the genre continues to crank up the cringe factor with increasingly dubious show premises in hopes that they’ll stumble into a hit franchise. Technology can be like that. Organizations invest in ground-breaking technology solutions, then add patches, fixes, and enhancements over time. In the short-term, companies can achieve significant process and resource savings by building onto an existing solution. But in the long-run, legacy technologies struggle to keep competitive pace, the enterprise architecture takes on a life of its own, and the organization starts missing opportunities. This is tech debt — the bane of IT departments at just about every mid-market to enterprise business. Gartner recently found that even in the face of “irrecoverable failure” of legacy solutions, many executives favor compounding technical debt by continuing to build on end-of-life systems, rather than investing in a new solution that better fits the needs of today’s business. It’s understandable. Starting over from scratch is a huge investment, with a large potential downside if it doesn’t work. Executives facing the high probability of a recession are more likely to hedge their bets. The answer, once again, is composability. At our most recent APIs Over IPAs panel discussion, IT executives from NetJets and OCLC talked over a variety of topics, including how to overcome tech debt by making the business more composable. If you couldn’t make the event, check out these short video clips: How composability can reduce tech debt How to increase API adoption (without resorting to buzz word strategy) How to decide between a COTS or custom API gateway tool Your end-of-life technology may not be quite as old as reality TV, but there’s no need to trail along with a has-been solution. Fusion's API experts partner with technology leaders from mid-market and enterprise brands to talk about the latest trends in modular applications. Find out how to get blockbuster results (without scary budgets) through composability. Register for our next APIs Over IPAs event

“API-First” is a buzzword, not a plan
Sep 21, 2022
This panel was moderated by John Dages, Technology Solution Director at Fusion Alliance (left) and features Ryan Shondell, Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC (center) and Jeremy King Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets (right). Good technology executives know that good directives must be followed up with action plans that create value. So how do you get the business on board with an API-first strategy? How do you enhance API adoption at the enterprise level? Solve an actual problem. Think of a legitimate felt need within a service or a function in your span of control and use microservices, headless, cloud-native, or composable functions to handle it. Buzzwords don’t drive API adoption. Follow-through does. Show the business how an API-first strategy makes their job easier. The average business user doesn’t care about fancy architecture. They don’t care if you use microservices, make something headless, or are running a composable enterprise unless it makes a difference in their day-to-day. They want the website to be faster or to have more capabilities so they can drive their own KPIs. So how do you drive API adoption when your business users are thoroughly tech agnostic? You build change management into your roadmap and win hearts and minds with results. When it comes to getting the business on board for API-first initiatives, the only way to build trust is demonstrable progress. About our panelists: Ryan Shondell is currently the Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC, responsible for developing and executing the company’s data strategy and aligned technology. This includes technical product management, data operations, data quality, and development of AI/ML capabilities, analytics, search, and all customer-facing data applications and APIs across a staff of 300. Prior to joining OCLC, Ryan held multiple senior engineering leadership positions at VMware going back to 2010, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering, where he helped to lead global development on products like Skyline and VMware Cloud. And now, he’s actually headed to Path Robotics to start his next adventure. Jeremy King has been working in Technology for over 20 years and is currently the Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets. He started his career designing and developing embedded systems and has worked in many industries including banking, health care, travel and transportation, and integration tools. His background includes distributed cloud-native architecture, data structures and modeling, enterprise integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design. As a Software Architect, Jeremy has faced the challenge of making disparate systems exchange data in consistent, performant ways. His current passions include technical innovation, graph databases, and emerging API standards.

API gateway tools: build or buy?
Sep 15, 2022
This panel was moderated by John Dages, Technology Solution Director at Fusion Alliance (left) and features Ryan Shondell, Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC (center) and Jeremy King Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets (right). The decision to build or buy API gateway tools for your organization is rarely black and white. Building an API gateway pulls your team away from other opportunities, but buying could lead to vendor lock-in. Off-the-shelf solutions might not give you differentiating advantage, but inventing your own protocols could accelerate your tech debt. How do enterprise businesses weigh the trade-offs? When to consider building an API gateway tool The custom tool will deliver differentiated value directly to customers or enable the business to deliver that value The custom tool solves a consumer or business problem that delivers market value The custom tool gives you a competitive edge in functionality, cost, or speed to market When to consider buying an API gateway tool Your IT time and talent is needed on other revenue-driving projects Your team could use an out-of-the-box tool as a platform, and build your custom functionality on top of it as an accelerator The tool conveys significant ongoing maintenance and support savings Know which shark is closest to the boat It’s not always simple to project future savings or quantify possibility. If you’re faced with a build or buy tech decision, sometimes you have to solve for the biggest issue at hand. That could mean you buy an API gateway tool or another off-the-shelf solution. Yes, it’s a vendor dependency, but every other part of your business has them, too. If you make a forward choice, and keep your eyes open, you can avoid many of the pitfalls associated with vendor lock-in. For example, finding components that are portable, avoiding proprietary pieces, and limiting the specialized components you buy outright can help. And it’s always wise to create a backup plan. As they say, “don’t have such an open architecture that your business falls out.” About our panelists: Ryan Shondell is currently the Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC, responsible for developing and executing the company’s data strategy and aligned technology. This includes technical product management, data operations, data quality, and development of AI/ML capabilities, analytics, search, and all customer-facing data applications and APIs across a staff of 300. Prior to joining OCLC, Ryan held multiple senior engineering leadership positions at VMware going back to 2010, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering, where he helped to lead global development on products like Skyline and VMware Cloud. And now, he’s actually headed to Path Robotics to start his next adventure. Jeremy King has been working in Technology for over 20 years and is currently the Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets. He started his career designing and developing embedded systems and has worked in many industries, including banking, health care, travel and transportation, and integration tools. His background includes distributed cloud-native architecture, data structures and modeling, enterprise integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design. As a Software Architect, Jeremy has faced the challenge of making disparate systems exchange data in consistent, performant ways. His current passions include technical innovation, graph databases, and emerging API standards.

Is your composable enterprise project working or causing tech debt?
Sep 12, 2022
This panel was moderated by John Dages, Technology Solution Director at Fusion Alliance (left) and features Ryan Shondell, Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC (center) and Jeremy King Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets (right). How many meetings do you have with Amazon when you want to use S3 to move a workflow into the cloud? None, of course. Amazon makes its S3 service easy to find, understand, and consume. And how many meetings do you have to have when you add an API to your own organization’s technology ecosystem? The “how many meetings” test isn’t a trick question. It’s a good rule-of-thumb metric to judge whether your service is driving value or contributing to tech debt. Bottom line up front: APIs must be consumable to add value. If you’re building an API and you have to have a meeting before someone can use it, something has gone wrong and you may need to reconsider your composability approach. If you build an entire composable ecosystem that works the same way the world used to work 20 years ago, you’re cruising for tech debt rather than ROI. A functional composable enterprise requires components that are discoverable, with documented constraints and functionality, so that operators can find what they need and put it into place without a lot of hand holding. This discoverability could come from traditional documentation, or effective use of introspection endpoints to allow for programmatic, systemic discoverability. Either way, to reduce your tech debt and boost the ROI of your composability, be sure to ask yourself: how many meetings did we have before we could offer or consume this product? The closer that number is to zero, the better. About our panelists: Ryan Shondell is currently the Executive Director of Data Services at OCLC, responsible for developing and executing the company’s data strategy and aligned technology. This includes technical product management, data operations, data quality, and development of AI/ML capabilities, analytics, search, and all customer-facing data applications and APIs across a staff of 300. Prior to joining OCLC, Ryan held multiple senior engineering leadership positions at VMware going back to 2010, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering, where he helped to lead global development on products like Skyline and VMware Cloud. And now, he’s actually headed to Path Robotics to start his next adventure. Jeremy King has been working in Technology for over 20 years and is currently the Chief Enterprise Architect at NetJets. He started his career designing and developing embedded systems and has worked in many industries, including banking, health care, travel and transportation, and integration tools. His background includes distributed cloud-native architecture, data structures and modeling, enterprise integration patterns, event-driven architectures, and API design. As a Software Architect, Jeremy has faced the challenge of making disparate systems exchange data in consistent, performant ways. His current passions include technical innovation, graph databases, and emerging API standards.

Spot the camels on your digital transformation roadmap
Aug 8, 2022
When the idea has legs, but you don't know how to use them In the early 1850s, the U.S. government was looking for ways to move troops and supplies through the American Southwest. Their trusty pack mules were no match for the arid conditions of west Texas, New Mexico, and beyond. Sound like a use case for camels? The government thought so. And when the Army initiated a proof of concept with a small herd of camels and a few camel drivers imported from the Ottoman Empire, the hypothesis proved out. Where mules died of thirst, camels kept moving. Where the U.S. wanted to blaze a trail, the camels not only demonstrated endurance, but also survived rattlesnake bites with no ill effects. The project was such a success that the Camel Corps commander asked Congress for an additional 1,000 camels. Instead, three years after the initial investment, the costly program disbanded, and the camels were auctioned off. Why did the Army take a loss on such a seemingly successful project? The answer seems simple in hindsight: very few American soldiers knew how to lead camel trains. Compelling use case. Promising POC. Project ultimately fails due to unforeseen upskilling and scalability challenges. Sound familiar? To escape that script, successful companies take a strategic approach, including change management, cross-training, and outsourcing in plans for any new technology tool or platform. After all, even the most exotic solutions are only as good as your ability to integrate, scale, and manage them for ongoing success. If you’ve tossed some camels on your digital transformation roadmap, it might be a good idea to stress test your strategy before you bet the ranch. Whether you need to ask a quick question, talk through a specific roadblock, or get a major endeavor unstuck, we can help. Our team of digital, data, and technology experts can, metaphorically at least, help you lasso those camels (watch out, they spit) and deliver transformative results. Get smart: You can read a fictionalized version of the true story of the Camel Corps in Teá Obreht’s novel Inland, which takes on cowboy legends from an unexpected point of view.

Looking for ROI in all the wrong places: How to get your cloud value back on track
Jul 15, 2022
A version of this article was originally published in Forbes. Theoretically, a case could be made for running your workloads, data, and applications entirely from on-prem servers. But realistically? That use case is vanishingly small. Nearly all companies can benefit from the cloud. And most organizations are well aware of the benefits cloud modernization confers. You’ve heard the touts: Cloud migration leads to faster run times, greater efficiency, and — here are the magic words — significant cost savings. As with any major business move, return on investment drives a substantial number of cloud decisions. But when you make those calls without a strategy specifically tailored to cloud environments, the risks add up. You wouldn’t relocate your corporate headquarters without significant strategic reasoning. Relocating your technical real estate ought to trigger the same level of analysis and corporate soul searching. If you aren’t seeing the ROI you expected from your cloud investment, you may need to consider a more strategic approach. Why you’re not seeing cloud ROI…and what you can do about it Companies have technology problems: aging servers, feral architectures, legacy applications, redundant workloads, wild west dev shops…the list goes on. Faced with a mess on the premises and a cloud mandate from leadership, it’s easy to understand why one of the most common strategies for cloud migration is lift-and-shift. All too often, though, a one-for-one move to the cloud is used as a shortcut to avoid having to create a full-blown cloud strategy and roadmap. Here’s how to avoid common ROI pitfalls. ROI pitfall: Unexpected costs Moving to the cloud can be a significant cost-saving strategy for your information technology budget, but it can also have the opposite effect. Without taking the time up-front to tune workloads and assess usage, you could wind up paying more for cloud storage/use than you used to spend for an on-prem solution. Understanding cloud pricing models, including getting clarity on all the variables that affect pricing in the cloud, couldn’t be more important — it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison to on-prem. Cloud costs are directly related to resources consumed, so lifting and shifting without a strong strategic foundation can cannibalize your savings. To save more in the cloud environment, consider: Resizing: Do all of your workloads run at capacity all the time? Or are they often over-provisioned? Would a lower consumption rate with surge capacity work better for your needs? Retiring: Are any of your applications or workloads redundant? Lift-and-shift migrations can shed light on previously siloed tasks that could be streamlined to reduce cloud consumption. Replacing: Would a different solution make more sense? A cloud migration offers the opportunity to rethink your legacy applications and combine or replace some of your workloads and applications. ROI pitfall: Ungoverned actions Your teams may be used to a high degree of autonomy, with different business units responsible for their own tech and data usage. Once you move to the cloud, however, that shadow IT culture can cost you. If users deploy new resources and enable additional capabilities to the cloud at their usual rate, your spending can escalate quickly. To avoid painful consumption spending, here’s how a fresh look at policies and procedures can help: Rethinking: This is a good time to standardize processes around development, quality, testing and change management. Recommitting: A cloud environment makes governance more important for your organization than ever. Take the opportunity to recommit to strong governance standards across your organization—and be sure you have change management plans in place to support the shift. ROI pitfall: Unanticipated fluctuations Even the best cloud strategies can’t always anticipate the variability of cloud usage. Costs and efficiencies of different cloud platforms might vary month to month or even week to week. Some companies try to account for the volatility by building each of their workloads four or more different ways so they can quickly shift from one cloud provider to another. Others get fed up and go all in with one platform. Neither option is cost-effective. To make the most of cloud price fluctuations, consider new ways of working, like: Replatforming: Are your legacy systems still serving you well? Could the costs of a hardware or software upgrade be balanced out by greater efficiency or better cloud usage over time? Refactoring: One way to manage cloud environments is containerization. As I wrote in my previous Forbes article, “Once your workloads are containerized, adding automation can save you even more by establishing, testing, and refining models for workload placement without relying on time-consuming manual decisions.” Google Cloud Platform, AWS, and Azure all have forecasting tools you can use to further refine your automation models. Rehosting: Containerized workloads enable on-the-spot decisions about where to run a task. Realizing savings then becomes as easy as a drag and drop to the cheapest or most efficient cloud or on-prem location. Rearchitecting: Could developing cloud-native applications serve the same needs but in more efficient, modern, or cost-effective ways? Why you should start with the end in mind While each of these tactics has value, the best way to avoid surprises and see ROI for your cloud investment faster is to start with a strategy. A cloud mandate without a cloud strategy is a recipe for cloud disappointment Up-front strategic planning can save you significant rework and help you avoid costly mistakes with your cloud migration. To maximize your cloud ROI, key topics to include in your strategy are: Evaluating your current architecture, technology, or processes: What’s working and what could be improved? Identifying redundancy and opportunities for improvement: What could be streamlined in your code, workloads, or data? Articulating fluctuations in your use patterns: How are your workloads prioritized? Could your data and storage needs be tiered? What might optimal provisioning look like for your organization? When it comes to cloud ROI, grounding your operations and tactics in strategy is non-negotiable. The more intentional your organization is about its cloud deployment, the more quickly your ROI will outpace expectations.

Reimagining the skillset supply chain
Jun 2, 2022
The pace of change and unpredictable circumstances of the past couple of years have led many companies to rethink their just-in-time approaches to resourcing tangible goods and materials. But why stop there? To scale and adapt fast, companies also need a new approach to how they resource skillsets. One of our clients, PRECISIONxtract, did just that. By taking a just-in-time approach to their shifting skillset needs, the company was able to scale up fast — and minimize risk — in a changing business environment. A right-fit-first approach PRECISIONxtract’s transformative healthcare market access solutions offer patients and providers unprecedented connection to the right medication and resources in clinical settings. To bring that vision to life, PRECISION could have found a series of single-skill vendors or taken the time to recruit and onboard new employees. Instead, they looked for a cross-functional partner that would be a seamless fit with their company culture and that had the right mix of scalable skills. They found that fit with Fusion Alliance. Fusion quickly became an integral part of PRECISION’s team, assembling a group of more than 20 strategy, data, and technology experts to deliver responsive support for a growing set of initiatives. Boosting surge capacity across disciplines Knowing that their flagship product, Access Genius, needed design and functionality upgrades, PRECISION called on Fusion to assess and modernize the application without disrupting the existing business. To avoid downtime and increase speed to market, our team used an Agile process and a model-driven design, in which models from the source code informed modernization efforts. Streamlining the overall architecture not only saved development time, but also made Access Genius easier to deploy to PRECISION’s clients. And, to make the product easier to maintain and cheaper to run, we applied containerization through a microservices model and moved Access Genius to a distributed cloud hosting framework. Our solution provided real-time customer insights that were delivered across a variety of digital channels, in lieu of a people-driven process. This helped take Access Genius: From a complex, cumbersome, legacy monolith into a lightning-fast, distributed, cost-effective, cloud-native solution From a user-driven, database-centric format to a distributed API-based framework, enabling immediate data updates for important cost and coverage changes From a time-intensive customer engagement portal to an intuitive, streamlined, automated process Equipped with a modern, stable, extensible platform, PRECISION was free to explore opportunities for more radical innovation. Disrupting the market with frictionless access to timely data Although Access Genius successfully broke down barriers with data, the solution’s interface required users to navigate a complex dashboard with manual clicks and drop-downs. For pharma teams with limited time to connect doctors to information, seconds count. Working with PRECISION’s product team, Fusion technology experts analyzed the friction point of manual navigation and explored ways to make Access Genius more seamless for the user. Drawing on deep expertise deploying cutting-edge technologies into highly regulated spaces, Fusion suggested exploring a shift away from a traditional web-based interface to an AI-enabled voice functionality that would connect users to the most relevant data and messaging right in the flow of conversation. Changing the way pharma enablement tools go to market At the same time, other Fusion consultants were hard at work rethinking the way PRECISION’s products reached, empowered, and retained customers. We brought in a range of specialists to bring new strategies to life, including: Instructional designers and training developers created an interactive training platform to equip pharma sales reps with greater confidence in provider interactions by deepening their understanding of the Access Genius tool. RESULT: Access Genius IQ, a new training tool that helps PRECISION customers see faster ROI for their Access Genius investment Brand experts, visual designers, content strategists, and web developers elevated visual brand elements and created websites, editorial content, and outreach campaigns. RESULT: New website architecture, design, and content; long-form lead generation content; prospect cultivation email marketing Digital marketing strategists, creative designers, and ad teams implemented innovative ad campaigns in rapid succession as PRECISION had more time to develop and roll out new products. RESULT: LinkedIn ad campaigns generating 3X leads, including 100 qualified leads in the first 90 days Read more about the success of Fusion’s marketing partnership with PRECISION >> Reimagining the skillset supply chain Partnering with Fusion gives PRECISION access to a huge team of experienced consultants with a wide range of skillsets — allowing the company to surge and scale as their business needs and market realities shift. With Fusion bringing in the right people at just the right time, PRECISION saves valuable time and resources, enabling them to be more innovative, more agile, and more impactful for their customers, healthcare providers, and patients. Ready to explore how Fusion skillsets can help your team succeed? Our ongoing work with PRECISIONxtract is just one example of how we help companies build momentum for a digital-first world. We bring big-picture thinkers, technology-minded creatives, data scientists, and technical experts to work alongside our clients, providing a force-multiplying effect that leads to scalable, future-focused solutions for the most complex challenges. Ready to get started? Let’s talk.

Three technology strategies walk into a bar
May 17, 2022
Composable enterprises are more fun than they look. If you’ve got a monolithic legacy system on your hands, sticking with the status quo isn’t a fun choice. But going nuclear and building back from scratch probably isn’t realistic. Wouldn’t it be great to find a middle ground? Meet the composable enterprise. It’s an iterative path toward digital transformation, with applications repackaged into components that can be used to build new solutions across the business. Piece by modular piece, you rebuild your technology ecosystem – becoming more efficient, effective, and scalable as you go. As the glue that holds those components together, APIs are key to building a composable business. And developing secure API solutions that accommodate shifting capacity demands and amplify your technology takes a hefty dose of strategy and expertise. That’s what we love about it! If APIs are your jam, too, or if you’re wondering if a composable system makes sense for your business, let’s talk. We recommend reading, Is your composable business enterprise project working or causing tech debt? Get smart: You’ve probably spent the day wondering how speculative/sci-fi/literary fiction relates to API strategy and microservices (or maybe that’s just us). But, we’d guess, the same type of mind that enjoys transforming legacy monoliths into composable enterprises would also really track with a book like How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Modular pieces linked together by strong bonds leading to an intricate and ever-expanding whole? We’re here for it (the book and the technology strategy).

Put your technology on a balanced diet
Apr 12, 2022
Your tech stack is like breakfast cereal. Tech creep is kind of like strolling the cereal aisle with a four-year-old (or a 34-year-old, no judgement) who begs for the choco-sugar-neon-behavior-bombs instead of the sensible-fiber-nut-loops you had planned. When it comes to building your tech stack or stocking your pantry, “it looked cool” isn’t really a strategy. And yet, for many companies, an enterprise architecture hodge-podged out of whatever looked good at the time often gets the job done. Until it doesn’t. A move to the cloud, a new data privacy mandate, or even the increasing demand for speed and agility to stay competitive might expose the imbalance in your tech stack. How do you get back to a more wholesome view? Realigning your solutions with your organizational goals and objectives is a great start. Regardless of how long you’ve been using it, does every piece of your technology still fit your plan? You might need to let go of sunk costs and admit that a tool has gotten a little soggy for your current needs. You might need to put your appetite for shiny new solutions on a diet. At the risk of straining our balanced breakfast metaphor past the breaking point (too late?) we recommend putting a healthy strategy on the menu. As guidelines change and organizations shift to keep up, this is a great time to reassess your tools and processes. In its simplest form, a refreshed technology strategy includes a current state audit, an ideal state articulation, and a plan to bridge the gap. Whether your internal culture skews Team Sugar-Bombs or Team Fiber-Loops, we can help you take a strategic view and bring your technology stack back into balance. Get smart: We get that it’s a little bit ironic for a bunch of tech consultants to recommend a book like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. But hear us out. Newport’s approach to consumer technology – that tech and platforms should have to earn their place in your life by proving that they help you meet your goals and values – has some merit for the business world as well. We’ve all seen what Newport terms “maximalism” at play in sprawling, bolted together legacy architectures. Maybe the time has come for a more minimalist, goal-driven tech stack. Whether you’re ready to start over or looking for ways to modernize what you have, we’re always happy to talk technology strategy.
Ready to talk?
Let us know how we can help you out, and one of our experts will be in touch right away.