One of the untold painful stories of the CIOs are the unexpected outcome of their decisions. In particular, the technology choices that they need to make is not an easy job. That too it’s becoming harder and harder while the years are pass by in the technology revolution era. The abundance of choice to choose is one edge of the sword and the maturity of the technology is on the other end. You (CIO) can’t wait for the technology to mature because by the time it may be too late in the game at the same time you can’t spare attention every other choice.

The technology advancement in marketing fuel up the scenario further by chasing you everywhere until you get tempted and beyond. Those technology surveys can be influenced and biased and you can never hold them accountable. Unfortunately, the uniqueness of your own business scenario won’t allow to cherry pick.

Investing money on newer technologies with the commitment to deliver results is bigger bet and gives nightmares. It’s quite common to see the CIOs are caught between legacy vs newer technologies. The legacy wont scale and the newer won’t keep up the promise either. In some cases, by the time the legacy gets decommissioned the newer would have approached aging. And the hunt for the perfect tech landscape will be never ending process.

Change in technology landscape is not bad but it costs the customer EXPERIENCE and investors’ MONEY.

One major reason for the struggle is, the CIOs failure to accept mistake and to find the better alternates. It’s NOT easy but not worse than hiding that secret and inviting a bigger failure.

I would suggest considering the below pointers before making any technology decisions

# Over engineering never adds value – Don’t introduce a newer technology to satisfy egos. i.e just because of so much of noise/hype on the newer technology. Your business success is dependent on customer happiness not on the technology choice. Probably you should burn your oil on the most demanding feature roll out than accommodating a newer technology. Have thick skin to say that you use a decade old technology if that serves you better.

# Call out failures and detour – As soon as you see a roadblock give a graceful exist. It’s not your longing customer alone would appreciate here, It will be highly appreciated by your engineering team as well. Its really tough to move forward when you know that the effort burned is taking you nowhere. Appreciate your team to standby with you all this time. It’s not easy to work to satisfy ego.

# Consultation vs Implementation – Intention is not to humiliate, unfortunately this is a hard truth many a times. Never ever have your technology consultant and implementation team are different. You can use them for your good cop vs bad cop play but hold them accountable for the outcome. You will get newer presentation deck the moment you press on accountability 😊

# Majority may not win – Just because everyone talks about it that doesn’t mean suits to your needs. Many a times just changing the tech stack won’t solve the problem but a good orchestration. Invest on R&D and do the impact study (Non-functional requirements, migration time, ROI, etc.,). The rapid phase technology changes are unavoidable. Seamless adoption needs careful validation. Your R&D team can really save dollars so invest on them.

Last but not least If you can avoid don’t attend too many sponsored tech conferences 😉

#CIO #leadership #softwaredevelopment #legacysystems