The Importance of a Technology Strategy

Creating a technology strategy for your small to medium enterprise (SME) is crucial for staying competitive and driving sustained and successful growth.

As we embark on a new year, here are some top tips to help you get started in 2025:

1. Understand Your Business Goals

Align your technology strategy with your overall business objectives. Identifying how technology can support your goals, whether it’s improving customer service, increasing operational efficiency or expanding into new markets is a great place to start.

And if taking that first step feels a little daunting, that’s fine and completely understandable. Many SMEs don’t have the in-house experience in IT/Technology, but partnering with a software development company with both strategic and tactical experience in the tech space is an excellent starting point.

2. Assess Your Current Technology

Conduct a thorough assessment of your existing technology infrastructure; a kind of Technology SWOT analysis. Identify what’s working well – your strengths, what could do with some TLC to improve – your weaknesses and where you feel you have gaps in your technology. This will help you understand what needs to be upgraded, replaced, or integrated.

This exercise will provide half of your SWOT data; for internal factors. We’ll look at external factors which represent opportunities and threats as we move through the rest of this article.

3. Define Your Vision and Objectives

Clearly define what you want to achieve with your technology strategy. Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. It’s likely that you’re not going to have the resources or budget to do everything at once, so really think about the sequencing of adopting new technologies, improving cybersecurity or enhancing data analytics capabilities.

Which are the most important and offer the most benefit to your business?

4. Prioritise Initiatives

As we’ve started to cover in point 3 above, not all technology initiatives can be implemented at once. So prioritise your projects based on their potential impact and alignment with your business goals. Focus on quick wins that can deliver immediate benefits and build momentum for larger projects. But also have an eye on medium and longer term projects which deliver improvements and efficiencies to your business over time and will be important for sustained growth.

This again is an area where Go Tripod have bags of experience. We’ve worked with many companies from a wide range of industries and helped them align their tech strategy with business objectives for sustained and successful growth.

5. Budget Wisely

It may sound obvious, but always allocate a realistic budget for the technology initiatives you want to invest in. Consider both initial costs and ongoing maintenance expenses over the lifetime of the tech and look for cost-effective solutions that provide the best return on investment.

Bear in mind that this may not be an off the shelf tech solution. In many cases a bespoke or custom software solution may give you better efficiencies and be more cost effective in the long run. And, at Go Tripod, we love nothing more than a custom software project. We love working with you and your team to fully understand your business processes, in order to build beautiful digital products for you and your customers.

6. Engage Stakeholders

Involve key stakeholders from different departments in the planning process. Include end users, include customers, if appropriate, and include your business leadership team. All of their inputs and buy-ins are crucial for the successful implementation of your technology strategy.

In doing so, you’ll ensure that everyone understands the benefits and is committed to the changes. This’ll make the often tricky to navigate change management element of your projects far more plain sailing.

7. Focus on Cybersecurity

This is a whole subject in its own right and represents one of the main external threats to your business, but cybersecurity should always be a top priority. Every business should implement robust security measures to protect data and systems from cyber threats. Security protocols should be reviewed and updated regularly and you should look to provide training to employees on best practices.

This is another area that often sends shivers up the spines of SME leaders, but again we have wide ranging experience and options available here to protect your systems and data.

8. Leverage Custom Cloud Based Solutions

Cloud based platforms offer scalable and cost-effective solutions for SMEs and often a solution which is customised specifically to your business processes will offer additional efficiencies.

And what an opportunity this presents to your organisation for 2025 and beyond!

Migrating to cloud-based services for data storage, software applications and collaboration tools may even give you an edge over your competitors. This can improve customer experience, as well as enhancing flexibility and reducing technology costs.

9. Invest in Training and Support

Training your teams when new systems are implemented will ensure they are well-equipped to use new technologies. However, this shouldn’t be the end of the training process. Providing regular refresher training and ongoing support will help your teams continue to maximise the benefits of new tools and systems.

And when you collaborate with a software development agency like Go Tripod, that’s all part of the on-going relationship. Whether you have new starters, people who’ve changed their roles or just need regular training updates, we’ll support you.

10. Monitor and Review

As with all business functions, regularly monitoring the progress of your technology initiatives will give you the feedback and data you need to continuously improve. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure success will help you identify those areas for improvement and adjust your strategy in order to stay aligned with your business goals.

Wherever you are on your pathway to executing a successful tech strategy, we’d love to work with you. We can create digital products for you, whether it’s a bespoke website, a web-based platform or a mobile app which will help drive your business forward.

We can even go a step further with our ‘CTO as a Service‘ offering and step in and act as your CTO on a part-time or project basis; something which is of great value to SMEs not wishing to go the whole hog with a full time CTO at this point in time.