The Business Owner’s Guide to Digital Strategy

The Business Owner’s Guide to Digital Strategy provides simple steps on ways to embrace technology to your business grow. You will learn how you can invest in new technologies to support and enable growth.

Developing a Digital Strategy for your business typically involves evaluating your present and future technology requirements, defining a vision and strategic objectives for the future, and establishing a comprehensive IT strategy to achieve those objectives.

The importance of strategic planning

Great technology partners have years of experience across all industries in helping clients achieve their business goals. They understand that their job is to reduce costs and support greater business agility by modernizing their IT applications and infrastructure. Your partner should have a broad awareness of your industry domain, your target market and how their domain expertise can help your business grow.

Turning your vision into reality requires a healthy, realistic approach and a well-crafted path toward success. You need to think realistically about where your business is going and be flexible about your expectations. Setting concrete performance goals is a great idea, but you need to support them with a realistic plan to achieve success. 

We have observed many situations where the business owner was supposed to plan an IT Strategy in a short period of time, in order to prepare the following year’s IT budget. Very often, they lack supporting business information in order to achieve this task. The result is a weak or no IT strategy. A weak IT strategy can be costly and wasteful, especially for resource-constrained organizations that operate without an IT budget. It also implies that organizations cannot respond to changing business requirements rapidly enough. 

Asking these questions about your business will help you plan your next IT strategy.

• Think realistically about where your business is going
• Should we consider outsourcing our IT Strategy development and IT Support?
• Are we making the right technology investments?
• Do we need 24/7 access to systems and data?
• Should we expand on-premises IT or start moving to the Cloud?
• Do we measure what is the real value to the organization derived from that technology?
• Is our current Information Technology agile enough; flexible to continuously support a successful organization?
• Is our Information Technology environment properly managed, maintained, secured, able to support the clients, and is it cost effective?
• Can our strategy support current and future business needs?

We often find that many small business owners are lacking the knowledge to answer these IT questions. For many small business owners who feel that their focus should not be detracted from their prime business, the benefits of IT outsourcing should definitely be explored.

How to Develop Business-IT Strategies

Strategic planning is crucial, but you have to do it right. And it takes discipline to do it consistently. This can be tough for most small businesses.

Here, in this strategic planning process, we’re going to look at the strategic planning process used by GTCSYS to implement digital strategies into many small businesses. By following these guidelines, your business can do more than just survive—you can thrive.

Identify Business IT Needs

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Conduct a focus group or interviews with key people and your team to gather information about IT needs for your organization. Solicit data about technical and business problems facing your company. Discuss how your company can best utilize its available operational IT budget to support the development of quality products and services.

Tie your business goal with technology planning

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Business goals and IT strategies are inextricably linked. A technology strategy should be designed in conjunction with each division’s aims and
targets and will set out how IT can help support them. This approach helps prioritize where technology is most needed. Each department’s strategy will identify exactly what role IT will play in supporting its goals. However, if there is no existing strategy, IT should play its part in designing one, taking into account the unit’s business needs. The added advantage of this is that it helps to establish a common framework across the organization.

Review your existing IT Structure

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The next step is to review your existing IT structure. This includes collecting feedback from the stakeholders and producing an inventory showing which systems are being used, which work and which ones are not so effective. This will help you in identify whether to improve the existing system or build something from scratch. List out the limitations of existing IT structure and prepare a plan to overcome those limitations into your new digital strategy.

Choose the right technology partner.

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Selecting the right technology partner can make the difference between a highly successful digital strategy, and a frustrating or even totally failed strategy.  A professional IT outsourced company will possess the business and technology skills necessary to ensure that the full benefits of IT are realized. It is commonly believed that an IT outsourced contract only benefits costs and, in many cases, this can be the case, however, in the best examples, an outsourced IT contract can have much greater benefits for a small business including offering a guaranteed way of ensuring the full strategic benefits of IT are properly realized.

You can learn more about how to select the right technology partner on our blog “How to Find the Trusted Technology Partners for Your Startup?”

Allocate your budget

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Prioritize investments before finalizing your business IT strategy. Although business improvement projects upgrading your current installations may appear lucrative, take calculated risks to expand general capabilities and install new innovative solutions as well. Allocate your budget on a rolling basis. Evaluating IT needs on an annual basis is typically insufficient with today’s dynamic technology.

Evaluate results achieved vs goals

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Evaluate your IT strategy on an annual basis. Validate data accuracy, acceptable levels of customer satisfaction, and cost and time savings incurred by newly implemented processes. Adjust your investments if success criteria are not met.

Savvy business owners will notice that this IT strategy looks suspiciously like a typical business plan. Indeed, a well-crafted IT strategy should follow the business plan format to adequately address business goals and present a blueprint for the future. As long as you remember that IT is as valuable as other business departments – if not more so – you should end up with a foolproof IT strategy.