5 Ways For Businesses to Assemble a Better Tech Stack

The way a business manages its technology stack can make or break an organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Technology solutions offer opportunities for organizations to do more, better, and faster. However, it’s not the tool itself that guarantees success, it’s an organization’s philosophy and process of building it.

To build a better, more effective, and scalable tech stack, organizations should be methodical in their approach. Organizations can customize their technology baseline, establish rules, and facilitate predictable lifecycle management to manage costs and maximize outcomes.

1. Start With Business Goals, Not Shiny, New Tools

A fully-outfitted technology stack is the thing of information technology dreams. However, your company’s success hinges on your leadership‘s ability to stay focused.

The first question shouldn’t be, “How can we use this tool?” Rather, the question your leadership should start with is, “What do we want to achieve and what’s in our way?”

Assemble leaders and individual contributors throughout your organization to focus on this effort. Identify your operational problems, where time is wasted, customer frustrations, manual processes, and data issues. This list will get lengthy, growing over time, and become more complex as you dig into this question.

Align your business challenges with what they cost you without solutions. Your technology stack should support revenue, satisfaction, compliance, and overall growth. Any improvement that can influence these categories is worth researching and testing.

2. Niche Down to Bring Tech Capacity Up

The temptation to select a technology solution that covers all your bases is real. However, tools that claim greatness across categories rarely deliver on their promises. That’s why niching down and leveraging vertical AI software can yield the best results.

Vertical AI software provides more industry-specific information and functionality that can better integrate with other specialized software. For example, ai in car dealerships should have access to specialized, automotive-specific information and data analysis capacities.

Instead of customizing a technology solution to the unique environment of a car dealership, use one designed for it. Every time you add custom coding to a tool, you create custom solutions to manage. By using a native tool, you organically receive essential security updates and enhancements.

By sticking with a vertical solution, you gain targeted solutions for your industry. Look for options that scale for an organization’s current size and growth potential. With space to grow, you can expand tool usage, and add features as you use it in your dealership.

3. Audit Before You Shop

Newer tools don’t always mean better tools. Just like in your home, where you discover duplicate items in your closet, so too can your technology stack multiply.

Review your existing lineup for potential redundancies and unused licenses. It’s possible that you have solutions that could meet your needs that have simply been forgotten. Even if you suspect that the tool won’t work, do your due diligence to test it before moving on.

Conduct an audit of each application, their cost, contract specifics, owner, licensed users, and their frequency of use. Identify which apps have integration capability and document current integrations, and those not in use. It’s possible that you already have the capabilities you need but aren’t using them effectively.

Collaborate with your security and legal teams to flag any applications that have security risks. Your industry requirements for data privacy may have changed since adopting the tool. Finally, tabulate the return on investment of the tools’ current use and identify if better utilization could improve returns.

4. Target Options That Play Nicely With Others

Integration is key for your tech stack’s ability to maintain utilization and effectiveness. Tools that stand alone can become siloed, forgotten, and outdated, inviting unnecessary risk into your organization.

With permissions, data should flow automatically between tools to bolster their effectiveness. With an AI tool for car dealerships, this means inventory management software reports to customer care platforms. When a shopper inquires about vehicle availability and features, your off-hours chat bot has access to the right information.

Technology integration eliminates the need for duplicate data entry, manual records synchronization, or kick off workflows by hand. Processes can move smoothly and inform one another as changes are made. When a vehicle sells, inventory management is updated and listings are removed online and customers only see available vehicles.

This connected system makes your employees’ jobs easier and improves your customers’ experience.

5. Examine Support, Longevity, and Adoption Capabilities of Your Shortlist

Be methodical with all tools you are considering, but especially so with those new to the market. New capabilities are exciting, but without robust support, integration capabilities, and customer feedback you may have unwelcome challenges.

Explore the support protocol and onboarding process with tools you are considering adding. Ask about training modules, agent support, and certifications for software.

Consider the time required for training and how that fits into your business ecosystem and employee capacity. Depending on the type of technology you’re introducing, this may launch a full scale, organizational change effort. Whenever you change how or where your people work, you must treat it seriously with the right support and strategy.

Formalize Tech Stack Management for Better Performance

Technology that is not managed, becomes problematic, so ownership assignment and standardization is essential. Determine the product owners in your organization, their roles, and the oversight needed. Smaller tools may require periodical reviews by an architecture while others may require data governance.

Outline your tech stack management process to ensure your tools are delivering on their promises and advancing your organization. By formalizing this process, your organization gains the benefits of technology solutions, manages risk, and achieves more.

Further Reading