5 Technology Strategies For Speed to Value in 2025
Five Must-Have Technology Strategies to Accelerate Speed to Value in 2025
The Confluence of Strategy and Technology
Where strategy and technology confluence is one of the richest intersections in business today, having a well-thought-out strategy that accounts for the most critical steps towards achieving your objectives helps to set a direction for the future, especially as you start to think about 2025. Applying technology to that strategy tactically allows you to add velocity, efficiency, and transparency to your strategy. The value of being able to track progress toward a goal and accelerate is a boon to any organization, as is the ability to know when adjustments need to be made.
Not all technology strategies create speed – in fact, many of them are slow and methodical. They take months or even years to create any value at all. The sheer wait for benefits puts your goals farther away. Don’t be stuck waiting for value in your business. You could find yourself with no value at all if the opportunity wanes. Head into 2025 with the right goals and how to achieve them.
Speed to value is the key to the most effective and nimble blends of technology and strategy. Incremental gains can begin paying off early and often, allowing them to compound. Even risk realized and identified quickly allows for adjustment and change, lessening the impact of failures as they come. With these five technology tools, you can increase your speed to value significantly, manage risk more effectively, and pursue strategic objectives more aggressively to make 2025 a year to remember.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is easily the hottest trend in technology strategies today. Business owners want to use it, software vendors want to sell it, and in the rush to make money it has become a buzzword with limited clarity. It is difficult to know what to expect from AI in the rush to monetize it. It’s just as difficult to know what not to expect, how to cut through the hype, and set realistic expectations.
Many of the tools available today that operate as AI suffer from a variety of issues. Many are merely generative AI – they can create unique content. Others are old technology with a new name – like business intelligence and analytics are rebranded as AI. Some are mirages pretending to offer things we would like to exist but do not yet.
AI should use your data to allow you to draw conclusions you wouldn’t otherwise reach faster than you’d be able to without AI. It should show you unique insights based on information and behavior it can analyze. When it comes to your business, you should seek to use AI to make you faster and more adaptable. For example, if you can use AI to model a turn in the market towards a specific product, then analyze the impact on your production lines to meet new demand, showing you when you need to increase materials acquisition, then you can beat the competition to the punch.
Your AI strategy should incorporate this kind of realistic and attainable goal. If the logic in the analysis is off, then the AI will be as well. Just as importantly, your AI strategy needs to include how to get your data clean and keep it clean. Bad data will twist your AI’s ability to bring you strong conclusions. The last thing your AI strategy needs to include is a human element – gut-check it and make sure you see the logic and potential impacts before you dig in. Moving quickly requires you to be able to correct quickly. If you are not able to understand your AI model, you will not be able to make good adjustments if something goes wrong.
Composable Environments
Organizations are run by complex IT environments that have a multitude of integrated parts. You cannot run a business on a single system, application, or tool. Stop assuming you should, as if a single ERP will solve all of your problems in the two years it takes to implement it – as long as you get it right, which almost never happens. Big box systems like (ERP, CRM, WMS, MES, etc.) are all built as modular, integrated applications. Vendors just want you to pay top dollar to buy more things at once by convincing you that the benefit will all come once you go live sometime in the future.
Applications and systems are critical to your ability to run your business and are no doubt critical components of your technology strategy. You can piece them together more dynamically than you’re being led to believe, and you can do it in smaller increments. Maybe you know you need to replace your entire green screen environment. That’s fine. But why pay up front to wait months or even years for the benefit?
Taking a composable approach to your IT environment is already happening in your organization. You should own it. People are building spreadsheets. They’re buying and building small applications. You should capture that ingenuity and direct it towards something that fits your strategic vision better.
Your IT environment should grow and evolve one piece at a time. You can do this and have a big-box end-state. The difference is you can get your gains earlier and more frequently. If you need a new software system or tool, take a look at the big picture and break it down. Your Composable Environments strategy should identify the areas where software can improve your ability to achieve your goals, prioritize a sequence for achieving them, and then target that sequence with technology in step-based improvements. It should allow you to leverage the best of each technology tool you buy as early as possible and integrate them in a cohesive manner that fits your longer strategy.
Maybe you’ll find that you did implement an ERP piece by piece. Maybe you’ll find that you implemented several systems one at a time. The most important part of your Composable Environments strategy is that it will achieve value from each deployment along the way and minimize the risk of each deployment by keeping them smaller and more manageable.
Digital Twins
Digital Twins are one of the most intriguing new technologies out there today. A digital twin, simply put, is a virtual replica of something. Olympic swimmers used digital twins in Paris to simulate small changes in their technique for improved times. Businesses worldwide are beginning to use them to model production down to the smallest detail to forecast production and maintenance as well as improve safety. These incredible tools are a combination of virtual reality, AI, and modeling that can show you what is possible in your manufacturing environment without having to even set foot on the floor.
The benefits organizations are gaining from the ability to create a replica of their operational environment and perfect every facet of production, from MRP to scheduling, quality to waste management, are still being measured. Many organizations are measuring gains in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Remodel your warehouse in a virtual environment, run scenarios, and find the optimal flow of goods before you move a single box. Add a multi-million-dollar piece of equipment to your production site with confidence that you’re placing it in a location that optimizes production capacity and throughput.
Having a Digital Twin strategy allows you to identify areas where your production floors and warehouses are generating even the slightest of inefficiencies. They are even more powerful when combined with an AI strategy that allows you to model improvements to identify maximum gains. Your Digital Twin strategy should create a replica you can tinker with, show you the results of different models, and provide live views without having to be in person. This approach will enable fast, clear decision-making you can be confident will produce value quickly and regularly.
Agile Development
Technology strategies are not complete without considering how to keep your new technology on the front edge of innovation. Every tool you bring into your organization should allow for growth and improvement in the tool itself. The trick is to have an ability to affect these kinds of updates quickly and iterative as well. Agile Development focuses on creating value in short intervals, allowing systems and technology improvements to be consumed in pieces. Agile Development is a great fit for Composable Environments, for example – both focus on generating value more quickly than an old monolithic, waterfall-based approach.
The Agile approach focuses on creating a collaborative environment between your IT and business teams that generates usable software quickly and repeatedly. This approach is critical to enhancing the outputs of your technology strategies the same way an experienced driver is the key to maximizing the performance of a racecar. You can go fast with limited experience, sure, but you increase your probability of a wreck and ensure the probability of waste and underperformance.
Adopting an Agile strategy involves a key shift in the traditional software development mindset to focus on smaller gains. It is highly disruptive to larger software implementations that focus on a single go-live event because it breaks the program out into multiple, regular deployments that spread the value and the risk out over a broader period of time.
Your Agile strategy should focus on the iterative nature of change. It should be the backbone of your technological drive to seek value in smaller iterative pieces that compound. It should also allow you to minimize risk by enabling quick responsiveness and leveraging transparent relationships between IT and the business to identify and confront challenges with speed. It should also include a significant focus on the magnitude of the shift in mindset it brings – for many organizations, Agile methodology is the biggest people-oriented change they’ll take on.
Sustainability
As your technological footprint grows, you will require more systems, access, data, and capacity. In fact, each of the strategies above is dependent on increasing one or more of these areas. To pursue any of them, you should consider how you are going to support each with hardware, software, and services. Sustainability by itself is an honorable pursuit. When you are intentionally growing your impact, it becomes a viable business objective in its own right.
There are many ways in which you can instill a Sustainability strategy as a material component of your organizational objectives. Sustainability is a part of being an efficient consumer of materials as much as it is being a productive member of the community. Either way, as you set and achieve Sustainability targets, efficient and effective use of materials and services directly impacts your bottom line by reducing cost and increasing output. Furthermore, being on the front edge of technology puts you in the company of the world’s leading technology companies. Whether they become your partners, customers, or suppliers, you can count on them to focus on their sustainability and the value they bring to their organizations.
Your Sustainability strategy should be complimentary to your growth and technology strategies. What is key to your Sustainability strategy is the common theme of incremental value at regular intervals. Sustainability goals do not create an impact in major fell swoops. They happen iteratively and repeatedly. As you focus on growing your use of technology, you’ll find yourself increasingly impacted by your Sustainability strategy, and if you have a good one, you’ll be ahead of the curve.
The Pursuits of Technology Strategies
In today’s day and age, technology will only become a more impactful variable in your growth ambitions and strategies. Whether you decide to take on AI, Composable Environments, Digital Twins, Agile, Sustainability, or some other technology strategy to accelerate your business outcomes, you no longer have to settle for a long wait for what usually ends up being an underwhelming result. You can accelerate your results by focusing on speed to value with these and other technology strategies.
You don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to understand it all by yourself all at once. If you want to discuss what technology strategies that focus on speed to value can do for you, reach out. We don’t just have a skillset for these things, and we have a passion for them. We’d be excited to help.
