On December 14^th, we had an Executive Briefing discussing the framework and need for a Technology Plan in your organization. Here are a few of the common errors we see in the scores of businesses we work with: [more]

• There is no “Technology Plan”.
  A technology plan is not an IT budget for your upcoming year, it’s broader than that. Your plan should be integrated with all the key aspects of your operation and organizational strategy. Do you have a plan in place?
• IT isn’t talking to management. Management isn’t talking to IT.
  If you’re an IT leader, learning to speak and understand business objectives is a key component in the value you bring to your organization. Being smart about techie stuff isn’t enough. Business leaders need to work to collide with their IT person/team and work to align what’s possible with technology to the organizational objectives.
• Silos of initiatives fragment technology initiatives.
  The sales team has a budget and purchases its own CRM software. Marketing is developing a web site with their budget and is not incorporating potential integrations that could assist the Service division. The IT technician helps implement a document scanning solution for the HR Director but solution isn’t able to scale across the rest of the company…. And so on… and so on…
• Business Leaders don’t know what they don’t know.
  Technology is viewed as simply an expense on the corporate P & L. The potential opportunities for business process automation are simply missed as they continue doing things the way they’ve always been done. Are you staying informed about technology? Your competition probably is…
• Technology is viewed as being disruptive.
  Great technology typically aligns to what you’re already doing well and syncs with your processes already in place. Having to “dump the boat” of how you’ve been running your day to day business to have it fit some software solution usually brings a load of unnecessary pain to your team. It doesn’t have to be that way, you can take the best of what you’re doing and the best of what’s available to yield the best results.

If you’re not talking to Pinnacle about your technology plan, talk to someone!  This initial conversation should not come with any charge to you, the first date is on us. Look for future Executive Briefings and topics here.