How a Tech Assessment Can Bring Great Value to Your Business

Every successful business owes its success to its innovative technology solutions. An advanced technological solution is always capable of bringing a new era of transformative growth. Major changes to your technology solutions can have a profound impact on the entire business.

For example, New York Road Runners, the world's largest running organization transformed its existing digital and IT solutions by opting for a leading-edge technology infrastructure that enabled them in delivering a world-class experience to the running community. An immersive and dynamic tech assessment helped them to achieve their ideal vision.

Many growth companies often struggle with siloed technology which was bought in a hurry to create more capabilities. Without a proper assessment of the potential impact of new technological development, the technology solutions can't deliver on future promises.

At this point, business leaders need to ensure the new technology can provide true value to the business as it continues to expand and grow, by opting for an extensive tech assessment.

Why is Tech Assessment Important for Your Business?

Delivering a meaningful customer experience needs a major investment in the right technology. This can be quite time-consuming and expensive. The last thing you want to know is that your new technology doesn’t meet your requirements. Surprisingly, this is what’s happening to several companies due to a lack of proper planning.

The answer?

Conducting a tech assessment depending on your current technology and your organization’s growth vision.

But how to get there?

Through an intensive technology assessment, to evaluate the current state of your company’s technology infrastructure and future requirements. More narrowly, a tech assessment emphasizes on where your present system fails to meet your business requirements. For instance, Steinway & Sons, an American piano company, was seeking the best way to optimize their digital maturity. In the journey of transforming their customer digital experience, Steinway and Icreon worked together to facilitate a powerful technology assessment to bridge the gaps in between.

Tech Assessment – The Strategy You Should Adapt 

A well-structured technology assessment process to analyze and choose a technology solution helps to achieve the true objectives of the business. The process forces you to both recognize the exact problem and solve it right away.

1. Before You Start, Think About the Business Results you are Seeking

Any successful tech assessment would need meticulous thought and careful preparation. For instance, an investor might need to make sure the current technology can deliver on future expectations. Before starting with the assessment, here are a few questions to ask to receive better results:

• Why should we perform a tech assessment? For instance: how to prepare for a partnership or investment, and what is the current situation of the team or products?
• Who will be the sponsor of the entire process?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are they hoping to achieve from the assessment?
• How will you respond to the results?

2. Communicate with the Key Stakeholders 

Tech teams don’t work in isolation. The product requirements come from sales, marketing, executive suite, and product management. Business leaders must take a close look into how the product requirements are being derived, whether the needs are justifiable enough given the skillset of the tech team, and how the tech team communicates with other teams in the organization.

This means that while conducting the technology assessment process, you get insights from all the teams that depend on the tech team to perform their jobs, for instance, key sales executives or support engineers. It is important to find the truth amidst the opinions of several stakeholders.

3. Get the Right People for your Tech Assessment Team 

It is crucial to have the right person from the right team for a successful assessment. If the assessment is complicated it may be necessary to use team members with broader expertise. Here are some examples of the expertise that might be required:

For technology and product development teams:

• In-depth knowledge of programming languages and frameworks
• Familiarity with cloud and on-premises infrastructure
• Best practices in software architecture

For business and management teams:

• Deep knowledge of business and revenue models in the target industry
• An accurate understanding of customer pain points
• Latest insights of the market and leading competitors

After onboarding the right talent for the assessment, jump towards designing, developing and deploying the assessment process.

4. Make the Tech Assessment Factual and Worthwhile 

While doing an internal tech assessment, it can be quite difficult to make it factual to enable the company to take the right decision. Because different stakeholders will have different opinions on the technology. Here are some of the best ways to make sure your technology assessment ends up aligning with business objectives:

• Establish a clear set of objectives for the entire process.
• Select the right team for the assessment. Ensure the team is having solid knowledge about the products and technology, a good understanding of how the entire business works, and inspire reliability amongst the stakeholders
• Conduct an in-depth analysis of the systems that need tech assessment and scrutinize them to understand their application, efficiency, productivity, and functionality. Such research will assist you in knowing what kind of transformation that system requires, whether they only require maintenance, or if they need a big revolution to ensure the right assessment. Scrutinizing in the right and detailed way is actually assessment itself. This way, you can make the whole assessment process more precise, worthwhile, and factual.
• Ensure all the stakeholders and others have received the key information regarding the processes and systems that need in-depth assessment.
• Be ready to take action on the results of the technology assessment process
• Consider using a third-party or outsourcing the assessment to bring fresh perspective and insights

5. Documentize Each and Every Single Step

After planning, communicating, onboarding, and discussing, it's time to start documenting the process. Documentation is necessary to keep records that you can later analyze to see how well the assessment went from start to end.

You must develop a complete assessment report. Ideally, the assessment report should carry:

• Summary and overview of the whole assessment
• Brief description of challenges, tasks, and issues, and respective initiatives you took to overcome these hurdles
• Development, implementation, operation, and deployment of information
• Description of duties and roles of all tech assessment committee members
• Total time duration and investment to be made or that’s already made on assessment initiatives

Documentation will help you distribute in-depth information to all employees, business leaders, directors, principles and stakeholders of the organization. Hence, it will also help create opportunities to receive more feedback, that you can leverage later to perform even better.

Use Tech Assessment Now to Make Smart Technology Choices

On the brink of major societal changes such as critical global economy, and climate change, several businesses are focusing on strengthening their technological aspect in these uncertain times. Completing the tech assessment is only the very first step.

Making the most of the insights received from the assessment will determine your next steps to update the current system or invest in a newer technological development to better meet your purpose such as operational, and financial goals.

To figure out what needs to be addressed immediately, explore Icreon’s Business Model Innovation Consulting Services.