Is Technology the Center of Your Service Strategy?

Strategic planning: a joyous occasion where leadership aligns on a shared mission for the upcoming New Year. These business strategies have a tendency to silo information technology into a department. All too often, IT is misidentified as a line item or cost center to the credit union. Instead, technology ought to be seen as a core vein to our service mission. Technology is the common denominator across all departments. And in today’s world, a technology strategy allows everyone to serve and grow.

Our business goals define what the focus will be, and technology answers how we will achieve it. We have evolved a decade’s worth of technology in the past eighteen months. How we conduct business is different, and our strategic landscape has changed. Now, the way we serve members and support staff looks different than how we have done so in the past.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, -Albert Einstein.

This marks a fundamental shift in the credit union blueprint. Today it is crucial to fuse technology with our business goals. This creates a Technology Strategy that supports every department of the credit union. The Technology Strategy enables the credit union to thrive and brings your service mission into its future state.

Between rapid innovation and economies of scale, technology can feel overwhelming. At its core, technology is simply defined as any tool that helps us complete a task. Cavemen had rocks; we have copious Cloud applications. The benefit of living in our current digital age is the variety and creativity it allows. With technology strategy, there is no one size fits all approach. Frankly, we have options.

Strategic alignment is key to how successful any technology will be at your credit union. Questions to ask while creating this Technology Strategy are:

• How do these technology decisions allow each department to reach its own goals, and how does this technology allow everyone to work together towards our collective purpose?

• Are we making technology decisions from a 10,000-foot view?

• Have we outlined how the outcomes of each technology choice impact our more extensive technology roadmap?

• Are these technology choices maturing our credit union?

• Does this technology make our environment stronger, more secure, and more resilient?

• Where are we today in our technology roadmap, and what do we envision our future state to be?

• Have we identified impacts at short, mid, and long-term timelines?

• What gaps are hanging? Do we have any blind spots?

These questions may feel like a bit of a rabbit hole, but they frame our technology decisions into our business strategy. An objective and vendor-agnostic voice brings a trusted perspective to your credit union. Technology roadmap discussions include technical analysis, insider tips, critical steps, and marketplace options. This allows your executive team to combine technology with your top business priorities.

Solutions are empty without strategy – arm your credit union and empower your executive team to align technology with strategy in 2022.