New Year, New Initiatives 2025
The start of a new year marks a crucial time for many organizations as they begin executing their new fiscal year budgets and initiatives. This timing creates the perfect opportunity to evaluate and implement transformative strategies and technologies that will drive growth for years to come.
Strategy First
Across the board, we have seen organizations doing the planning work last year to ensure they have the necessary strategy to hit the ground running when the new fiscal year opens new budgets for strategic initiatives. Whether they are looking to modernize legacy applications and infrastructure by moving to the cloud, biting the bullet and replacing that long-in-the-tooth ERP system, or looking at how AI can make their organizations more efficient. Don’t worry, there’s still time for those who haven’t done the planning work yet, especially if you built the strategy work into your 2025 budget in the first part of the year.
When looking to optimize your organization, take a hard look at your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. This deep dive is all part of setting the stage for a more productive 2025. We have seen our clients put off key investments in initiatives because specific departments are not good at managing big projects or can’t take on one more big initiative or change. “The longer you wait to transform, the harder it is,” says our cloud practice lead, James Scott. These deferrals take a toll on the employees who have to live with antiquated technologies and processes as well as the top-line of companies trying to grow. This situation may be an opportunity to bring in some help. We’ve helped organizations get “unstuck” for decades and are happy to do it with your organization.
Select the Best, Based on the Best Information
Once the strategy is set, it is time to get to work and select the vendors and products that will help you execute and implement key initiatives outlined in your strategy. A comprehensive technology selection process helps you ensure that all your stakeholders are engaged and provide their input and requirements for the initiative. Sometimes departments are hesitant to change what they’ve done for years, so, using cross-functional process workshops helps surface long-held misconceptions and misunderstandings about how things work in your organization. These workshops also help organizations see inefficiencies more clearly when visually displaying them using standard notation. Workshops combined with one-on-one interviews can provide a comprehensive view of how the business processes support the various stakeholders and potential opportunities to improve the process before implementing a new technology. Much of this early planning work can help fine-tune your return on investment expectations.
The selection process is driven by requirements gathered during the workshops and stakeholder interviews. This inventory of requirements should be categorized, attributed to the stakeholder or department, and prioritized according to its overall value. This “shopping list” will give you plenty of information for identifying potential vendors in the marketplace that meet your needs. When that vendor list gets whittled down, the real work starts. One key exercise many organizations miss when selecting a new technology is company-specific demonstration scenarios. Designing scenarios that will be most impactful to your stakeholders will help the vendors showcase how well they meet your requirements. These demonstrations will help your stakeholders see how the solution will meet their needs, and they can see themselves using the solution in their day-to-day work. This exercise will also test the mettle of the vendors who want to give you the canned demo that they provide all their prospects. The bottom line is, don’t settle for canned demos! Also, don’t forget to build a rubric to allow your stakeholders to score how well the vendors do in each scenario. This step will help build the body of evidence you need to make a data-driven decision for your organization. Putting it all together by combining the scoring of the responses with the demonstration scores, a list of pros and cons for each solution, and the five-year total cost of ownership will give you a complete picture of the important decision you should make.
If any or all of this sounds daunting, we are happy to guide you through the process we’ve used over a hundred times for dozens of different technologies across a myriad industries.
Emerging Business Technology Trends Impact Your Strategy
You can’t pick up a business publication without seeing the word “artificial intelligence” within the first few pages, if not on the first page of many. While many of us have seen and used AI in our businesses in some form, this coming year will see even more adoption in mainstream business. We advise going small, learning, and adopting where it makes sense in your business. Our colleague and AI expert Scott Weiner is famous for saying, “If you can do it without AI, do it.” In other words, AI should not be a hammer looking for a nail. However, if you can make a compelling business case, formulate a proof-of-concept to validate your metrics and assumptions in your business case and demonstrate how the solution can provide value to the business. Then, roll it out with the appropriate level of oversight, governance, and ongoing measurement to ensure it still delivers value over time. Scott has written a great article with his predictions for AI in 2025 here.
Security and Privacy, the Gift that Keeps on Giving
No conversation about strategic planning is complete without discussing how to secure your business. Your ongoing commitment to keep your organization secure remains a top budget and initiative priority. It just doesn’t go away. As the threats change, so does your strategy. Limiting your “attack surface” where bad guys can access, and the “blast radius” if things get compromised is an ongoing discussion with our team, led by Candy Alexander. We understand that aligning your strategy with the appropriate level of policy and governance is a tricky balance for many organizations, so don’t hesitate to ask for help along the way.