Importance of strategy vs technology

In today's competitive market, it would be hard for a business to be lean and efficient without using any technology or software. Some old school people still believe using technology is unimportant, but when two companies are trying to sell their product in the market, it is like a war scenario. And in war, the side with more arsenal wins, provided both have the same zeal.

This is similar to asking, should I purchase Aston Martin/Mercedes or Maruti Alto. The answer would be, yes sure buy the best car you want, but please make sure you have enough money to purchase and maintain it as well. Similarly for implementing a new solution rather than asking what is the best technology for this problem, you should ask what is the best technology for this problem given my budget and requirements.

Also asking the right person is important, like if you go to a car dealer shop and ask which is the best car for me. The agent would try to sell the costliest car he can or the car with the best margin for him. Hence asking friends with knowledge is the best strategy. Along the same lines if you are asking dev shop to suggest a framework for developing a new e-commerce website, and they suggest that woocommerce, magento, node, django, or some other tech is good. It may be best but not for you. If you do not know coding etc, the best framework would be the one which is widely known and is used for a similar website. For example, you can say just use woocommerce / django as others are using it and many popular sites use them as well.

Whenever we choose a custom/ modern framework it enables us to develop new features not available in competitors in a short time provided the dev team is good. But on the flip side, it also takes more time to develop features already available in the stock framework for that domain.

I want to tell you some stories about this. Some years ago we were developing a network system. we had 2k modems out there in the field. the system assigned private IPs to modems. After leaving other IP ranges we were left with 16K IP addresses. I raised this with my mentor at that time, that design will not work after we reach 16K. He smiled and said, when we reach 16K we will be rich, and would be able to hire intelligent developers to solve this problem. Although, said in humor, but his main point was valid, all problems do not require to be solved at the beginning. sometimes you solve problems at step 1 and move to step 2 and solve its problems.

The second story is that one of our clients asked us he was in dire need of a calling system, as the current system of copying pasting from excel is very time consuming and did not provide him any data. So, we simply added a column to excel which enabled their team to call from clicking the column. That helped them a lot and gave room to develop a proper solution to the problem.

Technology is a basic requirement. But strategy should be the governing factor for choosing the right technology not the other way around. The right strategy makes a winner solution, rather than technology alone.