I am writing about tech strategy 101 for 2024 because I have seen and read about a lot of bad decisions that have led to catastrophic results that could have been avoided. I have also seen and read about decisions that have opened up new opportunities and drive a lot of business forward. My purpose is to help tech and business leaders gain new opportunities and avoid pitfalls of bad decisions.
Before we go into tech strategies for 2024, we should look at where we came from in the past year. It was marked by innovation, especially the advent of ChatGPT and other AI language models. ChatGPT came out on November 30th, 2022 and by January it was the fastest growing app in history with over 100 million users. Since then it has seen wide adoption and uses from programming and software development to blog writing and many other applications. While AI dominated the headlines, IoT, big data, and drones made progressive innovations and also saw broader adoption.
When I approach strategy, I like to reflect on the wise words of Sun Tzu, who wrote the Art of War. The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military book on strategy written by the famous Philosopher General. I will use some of his quotes when discussing how you should approach your tech strategy for 2024 to highlight their importance to strategy.
What are your peers doing?
One of the things that Sun Tzu stressed in strategic warfare is to know your enemy. He said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” This quote underscores the importance of knowing what your peers are doing in similar businesses. IT and business leaders should know how their peers are taking advantage of new technologies to reap the benefit of productivity enhancements and innovative ways of doing things.
- Are your competitors getting contracts because they are compliant with for example, SOC 2?
- Does one of your competitors invest in an automated workflow tool, such as ZoomInfo that allows their sales reps to become more productive?
- Are 60% of your peers investing in 24×7 log monitoring or some flavor of managed detection and response in order to be more secure and reduce cyber insurance premiums?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Sun Tzu, Art of War
Knowing what your peers are doing in your industry can help you benchmark where your business is at and where you need to be investing. If you are behind the curve, that is a problem. Being on the bleeding edge may indicate that you are either setting yourself up for a strategic advantage or it may mean that you sunk cash into an investment that may not have real benefits for years to come.
Meet with Vendors
The phrase “you don’t know what you don’t know” is a well-known saying that reflects the idea that individuals may be unaware of certain information or knowledge simply because they are not aware that it exists or that they need it. But it is not an excuse to not do your homework. IT and business leaders should be students of the market and new technologies being released in order to learn where a strategic advantage might be revealed. IT Directors, Chief Technology Officers, CIOs, and VPs of IT all have the duty of researching market opportunities that impact functions of their business in a positive way.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Unknown
Talking to your vendors and learning from them about what others are doing and how they are doing it can help you seize opportunities for your organization.
10 Examples of Tech Innovation You Can Follow
“AgentAsk’s (our) mean time to repair (MTTR) is 11.4 minutes, compared with an industry average of three days.”
CIO.com
2. How Customer.io uses automated handoffs to enable smarter sales (close.com)
3. Anduril’s New Drone Killer Is Locked on to AI-Powered Warfare | WIRED
4. Bringing the power of AI to the Internet of Things | WIRED
“Cloudera claims its fleet management AI has cut downtime for fleet vehicles monitored by Navistar devices up to 40 percent.”
WIRED.com
5. AI Will Soon Transform Network Management and Monitoring | Network Computing
6. How Generative AI Fills Skills Gaps for Industrial IT/OT Convergence | Forbes
7. Using Technology to Create a Better Customer Experience (hbr.org)
8. What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work? (microsoft.com)
70% of Copilot users said they were more productive, and 68% said it improved the quality of their work.
Microsoft.com
9. How This CRM Company 2xed Pipeline with Dialpad Ai | Dialpad
10. Network Automation Case Study | Casa | HPE Aruba Networking (arubanetworks.com)
Get your house in order
It’s important from a technology standpoint that you get your house in order. What is meant by that is that you need you have a good understanding of all corporate assets in the field and have an asset lifecycle management system in place. The more endpoints you have in place, the more difficult this becomes. Windows 10 is going to be end of life in 2025, so next year you should be thinking about replacing a good amount of Windows 10 devices.
Additionally, your critical assets – servers, storage, network infrastructure, and firewalls should all be covered under manufacturer support. If there is one thing that cybersecurity professionals lament, it is un-patched, and out of support systems in the environment that could be exploited by a threat actor. Manufacturer support allows you to download critical security updates and replace broken components in hardware. Those critical security updates patch newly discovered vulnerabilities.
That leads us into having a good patching schedule. Routine patching is imperative, so make sure your standard operating procedures are followed for patching systems, whether you are doing that automatically or manually. I know a case where an organization had a managed services provider and thought their systems were being patched, only to find out that a small very important subset of systems were out of scope. With automation and managed services, you need to trust but verify systems are being patched.
Cybersecurity
When it comes to cybersecurity, at a minimum you should have the basics down. MFA, E-mail security (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC), end user security awareness training, and either endpoint protection or endpoint detection and response are all low hanging fruit from a cost and effort standpoint you should have in place along with routine patching. You can find more controls at The 18 CIS Critical Security Controls (cisecurity.org) library which goes into more depth on security controls you should implement. No security program is 100% guaranteed to protect you, but the more you do, the less risk you face.
Outsource and Focus on Your Core
No IT environment is an island. You need a team to help you with all the aspects of your environment, plus stay on top of trends to help your business move forward into the digital age. As a business and technology leader, you should be focusing on how technology can innovate your business and outsource tactical components to a managed services provider. You can’t be a help desk, manage network and security alerts, test backups, patch, and do all the things that rolls up to technology leadership. By outsourcing these tactical activities, you and your team can be strategically focused on supporting and leading the core business objectives.