Who Owns Your Technology?

Who owns your technology?

Too often I speak with leadership that doesn’t understand the impact of the decisions they make when purchasing and deploying technology solutions. This could be a solution or a service.

There’s a lot of systems that are required to speak to one another today. Each and every solution that speaks to one another adds another layer of complexity. The reliance upon these solutions to communicate effectively continues to become greater. Who actually owns the responsibility for these solutions? Is it your TMS providers? Is it your workflow system? How about your ELD? Who is responsible for the decisions you have made to bring the solutions together?

The COMPANY that is purchasing solutions OWNS their technology stack and strategy. Too often I hear “I am waiting for the resolution from the vendor” or “the vendor advised this” and in many instances the answers are not difficult but require multi-vendor discussions that aren’t always easy.

Companies should be making EDUCATED decisions to move their technology forward in a way that enhances their daily operations. Trust is sometimes placed upon vendors that don’t understand the full picture of all the technology deployed at the company nor do they fully understand how it all interacts.

This doesn’t mean that vendor partners are poor at this. This means that they are focused on what they do best, which is their products and the solutions that interact with their products frequently. Once again this gets exponentially more difficult when you have solutions interacting with solutions that are interacting with other solutions and there is a need to pass normalized data throughout all the solutions.

If your company does not have a great understanding of their technology that they currently have deployed understanding this should be a high priority for your organization. If you are in this state and are looking at deploying new technologies, you are at the risk of spending large amounts of capital and not achieving your goals as well as creating unknown risks. Not understanding best practices and how they can fit into your business can be critical to long-term health and the bottom line. One wrong uneducated decision can be very costly and potentially have direct customer impact affecting your top line revenue.

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