Why Your Strategy Must Drive Technology (Not Trends)

Informed decision-making and risk mitigation.

Have you ever thought about the difference between tech innovation and tech trends?

Just like in every industry, a new innovation in tech always brings a wave of hyped trends. They are easy to follow, make your company look modern and innovative, but sour quickly and can put a real dent in your strategy planning by failing to achieve desired goals.

Why are trends so attractive - but also wrong for business?

How is tech innovation differs from tech trend?

Innovation is a breakthrough or optimization, improvement of capabilities or creation of a new function. It unlocks a new way of solving existing problems and can build a real competitive advantage for your company.

Trend is a popular adoption of innovation, often driven by hype and fear of missing out. Trend tends to exaggerate the capabilities of innovation to make it look like a universal answer to multiple problems.

Here is a good example: mobile phone was a true innovation (a whole computer in your pocket!). Every company immediately making a separate app was a trend. For some it was a good decision - their business truly benefited from having a mobile-native applications. For others the focus would be better spend elsewhere.

Why tech trends are so easy to follow

Remember an old saying “nobody ever gets fired by buying IBM?”

That wasn’t due to IBM being the least expensive or producing the best software products. Buying IBM (seen as a safe technology vendor) was a trend, and since everybody followed it, the decision to pick them was less risky.

Imagine a project fails. There could be many reasons why, but your choice of a vendor cannot be questioned - it was a solid safe choice.

Tech trend provides an easy playbook

It takes a lot to stay on top of latest tech development - especially if you need to dig into what each new invention can do for you.

Following a trend provides a ready-to-implement simple playbook.

Have a specific problem? There is more likely a recently published trendy white paper covering a similar use case. And you can easily locate experts to help you with everything from planning to implementation.

And with so many companies following the playbook, there is a perception of best practices.

Being in good company

Following trends gets the company noticed.

It doesn’t matter if the tech trend supports the company’s business and growth goals - the talking points about following tech trends are still doing their job of signaling the market that your company is modern and hip.

Customers like modern and hip companies.

Examples of tech trends vs tech innovations

But what about specific examples?

Cloud Infrastructure

When cloud came along, it created an amazing shift. A company could now scale their hardware needs up or down instantly, without procuring and setting up servers and with reduced need for internal IT support. And that wasn’t all! Hosting apps closer to the customers, automating setup and configuration, distributed computing, serverless - the future was now. A true innovation, unlocking amazing capabilities.

As a trend, cloud computing soon became a “must have” part of any self-respecting digital transformation plan. A true buzzword.

Because we were still figuring out this whole cloud thing, “lift and shift” where entire infrastructure was copied over to the cloud without any optimization or taking true advantage of cloud capabilities was quite common.

And after years of solving various migration problems while facing an unexpected cost increases it became obvious that shifting to the cloud does not result in 100% improvements for every company regardless of metric.

It’s not a surprise that we are now seeing the opposite trend of cloud repatriation, with companies moving their servers back in-house and realizing impressive savings in performance and costs.

Agile project management

A typical tech project is over budget and over time. The industry does not have the best scorecard.

So when the Agile manifesto was published outlining a new way of creating software and managing tech projects, it was revolutionary.

No more endless meetings to generate requirements that nobody will ever read. Quick iteration where you can see real progress every week. Solid communication plan among the stakeholders and customer-centric approach.

The trend of adopting Agile (and using it as a metric of being innovative and fast) grew significantly, expanding outside of the tech industry into its own category, adding frameworks, certifications, consultants and coaches and, in my opinion, completely losing the spirit of Agile innovation.

Logically, the trend got applied to the situations where Agile approach did not present any benefits.

Projects with a small known scope, projects that require regulatory compliance overview or hardware support, very small teams - these are just some examples where using Agile will result in an extended timeline and potential product development interruption.

Software construction patterns

Software engineers don’t just type code. The use construction patterns to create applications and services.

A commonly used pattern that combines all code in a single application called a monolith. It has it’s downsides, especially for the large apps. The introduction of the cloud brought innovation in software construction patterns - microservices.

Cloud allowed code to be distributed across multiple servers (and locations), with parts of code build and deployed independently. Developers no longer had to wait for the entire application to build and different teams could be responsible for separate parts of the business logic.

Thanks to these benefits, microservices became a major trend in software construction, and later a default approach to creating new applications and services.

The truth is - not every application must be fully microservices based. Overusing the pattern brought complexity, maintainability and debugging issues and performance problems due to increased network traffic. We are now starting to see the trend reversing toward a more considerate modular monolith approach.

Gen AI for content

When ChatGPT burst into the market, it was a true innovation. The attempts to build a human-like chatbot were numerous but this was the most realistic attempt. The weekly user metric growth was like no other technology ever seen before.

Companies started adopting Gen AI for various tasks, with text generation being the most logical one. Multiple service offerings from vendors have followed and now it’s difficult to find a text editor that does not have some sort of Gen AI embedded into it to create new content for you.

The trend is obvious but using AI to generate your content is not the perfect solution for every brand or company. Remember how CNET faced a public backlash after posting erroneous AI generated articles? Multiple law firms got caught citing imaginary court rulings. And now, facing the surging volume of low quality content, Google and Youtube are starting to penalize the publishers.

The dangers of hopping on a tech trend

Much was said about wasted resources - so I want to focus on two issues outside this common advice.

Tech trends become obsolete fast

From cloud migration to cloud repatriation. From microservices to modular monoliths. If you are still in the middle of adopting the first trend when reverse is happening, what is your plan?

Are you sticking with the trend, risking to look out-of-touch? Are you reversing what you’ve just done?

Continuing the trend requires a strong conviction that the decision was - and still is - right for your company. Which brings me to the second point.

Surface level adoption

Understanding business value tech innovation brings takes time and experimentation. The industry may promise the world, but often digging into trend messaging reveals a lot of marketing and not enough substance.

Without developing a strategic plan that works for your business - and then matching a technology that can accomplish this goal in the most efficient way - it’s difficult to develop that conviction that the decision was right. A time chasing the trend is better spend learning what tech innovation can do for you.

The value of tech innovation

While trends can sour quickly, innovation can be studied and built upon.

Sustainable competitive advantage

If everybody is doing the same thing, how do you stand out? By learning what tech innovation can do and then figuring out a novel ways you can build a unique service, product or business model.

Organizational agility

Building up an experimentation portfolio and a solid tech foundation helps your company to respond quickly to market shifts (and market changes is one thing you can count on).

The secret of tech selection for strategic planning

The secret is there is no one-size-fit-all best-practices solution.

The best approach is to drive technology from within and build your own trends, picking strategy over hype.

Examining your marketing messages

Companies often announce that they are now “AI-first” or “digital-first” (which is very trend-like) - but what does that actually mean?

By focusing on strategy first, you can build a precise leadership message that makes it clear what needs to be accomplished. Without this precision the implementation of “digital-first” is open to interpretation - and now imagine you have multiple departments creating their vision of this strategy.

Creating your own trends

There are few ways your company can approach creating internal trends - amd moving from trend follower to innovative trend setter.

You could start by focusing on innovation itself - or on your business goals.

The innovation-first focus creates internal experimentation lab where you can learn what specific technology can do - without particular business problem in mind. The goal is to learn capabilities and build internal expertise by creating a shareable demo. Then the tech becomes a new tool in your problem solving toolbelt.

The problem-first focus concentrates on outlining your business goals and then iterates on proposed solutions and which technology can be used to solve it best.

Innovation-first approach builds your tech foundation muscle while problem-first helps to break out of the mindset that tech is always the solution for every single business problem.

Regardless of approach, foster the internal culture where technology choices are not driven by hype but by data and customer and employee feedback. The goal is to create organic tech adoption that is beneficial and works with your business goals.