So you have the best apps, but do they talk to each other?
In 2014, two teams faced off against each other in the semifinals of the FIFA World Cup. One boasted of having some of the biggest stars in the game, while the other simply had a reputation for working well as a team. The result was one of the most famous defeats in modern football history. At the end of the 90 minutes, Germany had defeated Brazil 7-1. The team had beaten the stars. They then went on to beat another star-studded squad in the finals to lift the World Cup.
What does this have to do with business? The performance of a business's technology stack is a lot like football, more so than it is like, say, basketball or cricket. In the latter sports, games can be dominated by the brilliance of an individual. But football rewards team chemistry and punishes weak links—just as a tech stack falls apart when every piece does not function smoothly together. No one 'player' can afford to drop the ball. No matter how well one app performs, it's not enough—it's the team's performance that counts.
You might be looking to build a technology stack from scratch for your new business. You might be looking to overhaul old legacy systems. Or you might be scouting for new technology tools to add to the mix. No matter which group you belong to, the ICE framework will give you clarity on how technology and business converge.
The tech stack
Your tech stack is the sum of all the applications and tools that your organization uses to navigate challenges on a daily basis. Its size, scale, and complexity depend on your business workflows.
When working optimally, you can expect your tech stack to:
- Streamline workflows and increase efficiency
- Provide actionable insights and business intelligence for
your organization to evolve and grow - Automate routine tasks, saving time and costs
- Reduce human input and human errors
- Improve synergies across departments
In today's landscape, every company is technology-driven, whether they make high-end apps or paper towels. Merely leveraging technology, analytics, and automation is not enough to give you a competitive advantage—it's about how lean and efficient your stack is and how well-aligned it is with your business strategy and customer journeys.
The market situation
Picking your dream squad of apps is no easy decision, given the amount of choice in the market today. Smaller companies typically tend to depend on low-cost and flexible stacks, while organizations serving large B2B clients may focus on scalability.
The question of how to select your business's technology stack can be answered many different ways. You could go by the individual capabilities of each app for each function in a typical 'best-of-breed applications' approach. You could go by ratings and reviews and what's hot on the Magic Quadrant. Or you could rely on suite-based solutions that offer larger modules. Organizations today have different stacks for different functions, such as marketing, customer relationship management, team collaboration, and more.
Potential risks
The abundance of choice in the market is one of the factors contributing to the technology sprawl that many organizations face today, wherein they possess too many tools and a good chunk of them are underutilized. Many apps end up becoming shelfware.
This situation is wasteful from a financial perspective and burdens an organization with technical debt, lack of organizational visibility, suboptimal data and analytics, security issues, and widespread inefficiencies. Organizations may acquire apps individually over time due to perceived needs, but without a strategy in place, the result is an overabundance of tools with wasteful overlaps in functionality.
Beyond the number of individual apps, working with a large number of vendors poses its own problem. A vendor who offers more than one app usually ensures that all their products integrate well with each other. However, with apps from many different vendors, data gets stored in silos, and key stakeholders work based on incomplete context.
Even companies not facing technology sprawl may still be burdened with systems that were not built for each other and suffer from a range of issues, including security gaps and data silos.
Tech stack swelling? Apply ICE.
It's important to build a tech stack that can grow with you and help you adapt to the evolving challenges of the business and technology landscape. Keeping the ICE framework in mind helps you identify the right applications and declutter your stack, while designing for scalability.
What is ICE? The letters stand for 'Integration, Customization, Expandability'. Here are the questions you need to be asking yourself:
Integration - How well do your apps integrate?
Integrating the various processes at your company drives efficiency and productivity. It maximizes information flows between different stacks, functions, and departments, offering decision-makers a 360-degree view of the company. It also enhances data quality, streamlining and unifying sources of truth. This serves as a robust foundation that drives data analytics, providing insights on changes in market dynamics and helping your organization respond to them quickly.
According to data, a mid-level organization today uses over 185 apps. That is a LOT. And naturally, with so many apps, there is a lot of room for things to slip through the cracks. Lack of integration also makes workflows between these applications challenging and poses security challenges. It impacts the quality of insights you can derive from your data.
Third-party integration platforms often have drawbacks, like a limited number of tasks for a particular subscription plan or additional training needed to handle them. Integration via APIs can mean that maintenance and updates will have to be done to various integrated applications simultaneously, so that they don't break due to changes in one app. This cascading effect of changes can be a drain on budgets and time.
Where possible, it's vital to ensure that your apps possess built-in integration capabilities. Native integrations are easier to maintain and help you avoid further clutter with middleware. It also reduces the number of developer hours required to make things work.
Integration cannot be an afterthought—it should be factored into the equation before shortlisting your tech products.
Customization - Are they customizable?
A good out-of-the-box experience for software is crucial. However, in today's fast-paced world, that's not enough. Businesses need to be able to tailor solutions and map them to their unique workflows and industry nuances. This means that software customization is a key criterion to watch out for.
Over the years, software products have aspired to a high level of simplification, increasing their market success through accessibility. Still, sometimes it comes at the cost of another segment—the power users. Customization ensures that while apps are user-friendly, they also help power users maximize their productivity and make full use of the software capabilities available. Customization-friendly applications may offer numerous themes or present a modular approach to software development, enabling the toolkit to be modified to serve specific needs.
Additionally, with the excess of user interfaces that decision-makers have to navigate, customization can effectively combat the cognitive overload and focus depletion that's prevalent today.
Expandability - How expandable is your stack?
Since technology and customer needs are both evolving fast, there may be a capability that's a must-have in two years but isn't on anybody's radar right now; and organizations must be prepared to accommodate that functionality into the tech stack when the need emerges. This means that every app should ideally be something you can build on. You must be able to add apps but also develop and build your own offerings to add to your stack.
How the odds are stacked
It helps to think of your tech stack as never complete—a perpetual work in progress. This doesn't mean you fiddle with it constantly. Like a stock investment portfolio, constant changes will impact your ROI. You need to leave it alone for long periods of time and let it do its work, making changes only when necessary.
A tech stack that passes the ICE test will be one that is flexible and that empowers an organization to be resilient, agile, and able to navigate the challenges of the present and future successfully.
