Technology is a means, not an end

Let's kick a few misconceptions in the teeth, shall we?

Achieving a high level of technology just for the sake of it, unless you are a tech giant, will provide small value to your company - really, regardless of your company's domain. As I just love reading articles and books throwing assertions without argumentation, we won't leave it at that but there's another trend we need to look in the eye as well.

You have to keep up. Let me rephrase that: You HAVE to keep up.

That's what everybody tells everyone these days: be in the technological race or die. The worst thing is, we've seen enough cases of companies failing or plain refusing to hop in the tech wagon who miserably crashed (remember Kodak?) not to take it seriously.

And now, the press is full of articles about companies who pull back from the Public Cloud offerings safely into the hands of their own Private Clouds, or even on-premise. Companies are so focused on achieving innovation that they either fall short (I'd have loved to see the Convergence project from Canonical but that never happened; Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch and Windows Phone OS were victims of a rather competitive market...) or much worse, release massive failures (Samsung Galaxy Fold anyone?).

That one's priceless, literally. Some folks even had a plush cat tap the switch.

So. No "Tech for the sake of tech", no rushing forward and no standing idle either. How does that spell?

RATIONALITY - that's the word. 

Assess honestly your technical/technological situation and capability and TAKE IT FROM THERE. 
It's okay to feel like you're late at the party. It's perfectly fine if you don't know how to get there. It's also a good sign if you're at the party and you're not having fun. It simply shows introspection, and at the very least, it's the beginning of a change if you don't get discouraged.

There are only 2 bad signs: 

• Standing idle. You want to stay at home and ignore the fuss. That's bad because there is something within you or your company that holds you back. "Too old", "too difficult", "it will pass" are no arguments, but they could be excuses for refusing to get confronted to the difficulties. Now to be clear, let now one mock you for that, technology is not everyone's cup of tea. I would have said otherwise a while back, but now I can say I'd rather see a company refusing to get there for fear of failure than a company in the situation below, rushing blindly forward. Still, you need help - there are plenty of consultants out there who could help you make a first step, or if not, have a clearer picture of what the party is about, what it entails and how you could benefit from it. But by all means, don't be another Kodak.

Maybe a wrong pick, it looks quite cosy.

• Rushing forward. You're at the party, and are so much beyond drunken state that you can't even see the bouncers, Mr Reasonable Investment and Mr Master Plan, closing in on you. In that case you need to find a proper technical decision maker and a bucket in which to expurge all the bad ideas, products and/or decisions you're infused with. You may have been sold, in a dark alley by a shady person, the nasty buzzwords of our time that nobody in your company fully understood - such as "blockchain", "serverless", "RPA", "Geo-replication", the oversold "SaaS" and the horrible "API" - but they all seemed so hype at that time that you simply couldn't pass. Now you have an incontrollable tech stack, your bank account is depleting faster than a beer keg at a metal festival in various subscriptions and consultancy companies, and you would like to know when the ROI will show its pretty face. This is the worst situation to be in, simply because you're in for months of mucking up after taking the hardest decisions in your company's life - and you will still not make a profit out of that. Still, if you can see yourself in this picture (the metaphor above, not the image below), there's hope.

Note: this is not a depiction of the metaphorical tech party.

As long as you don't see yourself in those two situations (although a little bird tells me that anyone in the second would have a hell of a hard time realising it, and they're in for a nasty company-wide hangover...), you can get there with just a small effort and some guidance - or a greater effort and no guidance, that's up to you, but you'll most likely go reinventing the transistor at the age of hyperthreading.

So how do you get there?

One step at a time.

It seems very easy to do, but it's not. Between the pressure to move forward and the multiplicity of solutions which exist out there, throwing in the risk of failure, there's reason enough to hesitate. Not everybody is sitting on a pile of money to be thrown at problems until they disappear (funnily enough though, in technology it seems that the more money your hurl, the more problems seem to pop up and they get bigger as well).
But let's face it, you need to decide using different criteria here - financial equilibrium and ROI may not be the best counselors in the world in every aspect.

Think of it as a project. You assessed above where you were, and you identified the need to move forward - further or at all is simply a matter of self-perception. And the situation may very well be that you don't know where to begin, how to work, how to implement and most importantly, how to make sure that you are on track. The key difference of such a project is to accept that the goal is hazy at best (that's not overly reassuring, right?), but that milestones are fairly independent and will help shape the next ones.

Which one you should take, either as the next or as your very first, is a very complex decision process which I will try to cover in one of the next articles (see? Milestones.). But by chunking the road to a comfortable technological stack or a vastly automated business process referential, you will ensure that those chunks are digested faster, more easily budgeted, and not too harmful if failed. Perhaps more importantly than the previous, you will have more information and knowledge to decide which one to pick.

What I am advocating for here, is to have a self-assumedly approximate vision of the technical/technological future of your company, because that will allow you to react faster to external innovations. On the opposite, a highly efficient 3-year plan outlined today with minute details and a fixed roadmap will most likely be obsolete in 6 months (and most certainly in 2 years), and you will end up having to make difficult decisions fast, which is typically where mistakes are made. You could still survive - sometimes people are even offered a grace period from the consequences of a poor choice - but the risk is not worth the price.

Totally gratuitous, granted, but not unrelated at all.

Automate, don't innovate!

Catchy, right? It actually makes more sense than it should, what with all these Innovation Summits and Awards and hashtags. Going at your own pace, one step at a time, certainly is OK for optimisation but will not bring you close to technological innovation, the Graal of our time.

But that's OK.

For most companies, innovating will not drive their business. It will not boost the EBITDA nor make the employee satisfaction level soar.
By focusing on small steps, you add something to your business. A small thing, which actually should always be the end of all means: value. Human, financial, commercial, the only depends on your line of business and your company's, hah, values.

And anyway, how can you aim for innovation if everybody in your company is engrossed in mind-numbing operations? How can you do that if you are fighting for survival? Should you actually aim for innovation?

A plane-propelled bike! It's a wonder nobody ever tried that!

I would not. Aiming for innovation means trying to do better than anyone else, consciously or not. If you set yourself on such a track, you take the risk to aim too high - ensue discouragement, budget going through the roof, disappointment at downsizing... - or fall too short - ensue discouragement, distrust, disappointment... - when not both.

Stay focused. Aim for the next target, and design the following ones. By achieving step-by-step optimisation, through automation or any other means*, you generate value for your business, which transforms into food for thought and more possibilities. That in turn transforms gradually into profitability, which gives an edge to your business, which allows you to invest into more and more optimisation, iteration after iteration. Not quite a full circle, but rather something looking very much like this:

If that wasn't a lengthy introduction to a company logo, I don't know what is.

There's still plenty of things to discuss and cover on that topic, many of which are obviously company-specific or industry-specific. There are many points here where my explanations will fall short, but I'm writing articles, not books. Still, if you feel like arguing, feel free to use the comments! Or stay tuned for the next article.

PS: No stupid gifs because I care for IP. But art is full of surprises, including the right to reuse reproductions in a commercial context, so I think it's an interesting change.