In planning our new Forrester Decisions service, Forrester interviewed many tech execs like you to discover your greatest priorities. You told us that “demonstrating the business value of technology” is a major challenge and focus. But as we chewed on this input, we recognized that “demonstrating” is a rearview-mirror approach. In fact, our ongoing research emphasizes the power of tech’s business value. Tech execs like you should use the business value of technology to drive a future fit technology strategy — one that is adaptive, creative, and resilient — to match changing business needs and expectations, rather than just demonstrate technology’s alignment, because:

  • Customer obsession is redefining business, centered on customer value. Leaders are predicting emerging business, market, and customer models — and pursuing them rapidly with flexible technologies and changeable organizations.
  • Siloed, cost-centric business shifts to value streams spanning co-innovation partnership ecosystems. Siloed, cost-centric functions can’t quickly reconfigure business structures to meet emerging customer and employee needs. Future fit firms are adaptive: They enable and empower employees and leverage powerful co-innovation partnerships that keep their focus thanks to shared accountability for strategic goals and objectives.
  • Technology is becoming increasingly flexible, reaching end to end across ecosystems. In these networked partner ecosystems, you must execute a future fit tech strategy, achieved through value-driven, cloud-first, platform-based, and continuous delivery (Agile, DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery automation, AIOps, continuous testing, and dynamic backlogs).

Use Tech’s Business Value To Plan, Govern, And Communicate Your Technology Alignment

Forrester has developed a set of models, tools, and frameworks for you to draw on when you need to drive technology’s business value across your tech strategy’s planning, execution, communication, and governance phases. Our ongoing research also continues to surface leading-edge approaches that can guide your next steps in becoming an effective technology organization. In 2022, this research will focus on finding new ways for you to define, apply, and accelerate your technology’s business value by helping you:

  • Focus your strategic plan and roadmap on business and customer outcomes. Future fit tech execs apply our four principles of customer obsession (customer-led, insights-driven, fast, and connected) to their strategic planning to drive competitive change. We are helping you build plans and roadmaps that accelerate your future fit strategy.
  • Employ business capability maps to facilitate your communication across the enterprise. Leading tech execs use business capability maps to frame open conversations around business strategy. We are helping you focus the conversation on evolving strategic capabilities in ways that move the organization toward its business goals.
  • Bring value stream management into the forefront of your planning-to-operations. Value streams describe the flow of information and activities across your enterprise’s, partners’, and customers’ ecosystems that create business and customer value. They provide the language and insights for your individual contributors, product owners, and tech and business executives, as well as partners, to prioritize activities and investments that maximize value creation.
  • Base your business case on end-to-end value streams. Our tools and templates are helping you apply value stream management for greater transparency of costs and resource availability that enables more effective business case modeling.
  • Transform your strategic portfolio management into outcome management’s foundation. We are laying out the ways your strategic portfolio management practices enable organizations to select and execute on the investments necessary to drive your specific business and customer outcomes.
  • Manage your tech budget to optimize the effectiveness of your value realization. Future fit technology organizations increasingly use effectiveness as a value framework to prioritize and focus their technology investments. Our frameworks build effective ways that help transform your technology initiatives to better produce your desired business outcomes.
  • Measure your success based on objectives and key results through scorecards of KPIs. Behind every successful transformation is a coordinated group of business and marketing, operations, and technology professionals working toward a common purpose. Our work on objectives and key results (OKRs) provides you with simple language tied to clear and timely success metrics that define your goals and create common purpose across every stakeholder.

There is a lot of great research underway, and our team can assist you in applying it in the best possible way. Let us know what else would be helpful to you and your team to drive your technology investments with business value.