Technology Strategy Without the Jargon
Most technology strategies are too abstract to be useful. They describe a desired future state in aspirational terms — "cloud-native," "data-driven," "AI-enabled" — without providing enough specificity to guide actual decisions.
A strategy that cannot tell you what to do when two reasonable options conflict is not a strategy. It is a vision statement with a longer title.
What a Useful Technology Strategy Does
A useful technology strategy makes trade-offs explicit. It says: given our resources, our constraints, and our business goals, here is what we will prioritize and here is what we will defer. It is a decision-making tool, not a roadmap.
It also has a time horizon that matches the business context. A three-year technology strategy for a fifty-person company is almost certainly wrong before it is finished. Shorter horizons with explicit review cycles are more honest about the uncertainty involved.
The Questions Worth Answering
Rather than starting with technology choices, start with the business questions:
- What capabilities do we need that we do not currently have?
- What existing systems are constraining growth or creating operational risk?
- Where is our technical debt concentrated, and what is it actually costing us?
- What decisions are we likely to face in the next twelve to eighteen months that technology will need to support?
The answers to these questions should shape the technology choices, not the other way around.
On Buy vs. Build
One of the most consequential decisions in any technology strategy is where to build custom software versus where to adopt existing tools. The default should almost always be to adopt — custom software is expensive to build and expensive to maintain.
The exceptions are narrow: where no adequate solution exists, where the capability is genuinely core to competitive differentiation, or where the integration requirements make adoption impractical.
Most organizations build too much and adopt too little. A clear strategy makes this trade-off explicit and applies it consistently.