The IT landscape today is anything but simple – the shelf life of technologies is reducing, and new-age technologies such as cloud, AI, and ML have matured.
But, as the application economy strengthens and businesses become dependent on software, increasing the capacity to develop deep-tech products is important for organizations.
Without in-house skills, organizations look towards technology partners to help them develop these products. Considering the complexities of the software universe and deep tech products, deciding on such a partner becomes a strategic decision because it has a long-term business impact.
But what traits must organizations observe to ensure they are selecting the right partner?
Domain expertise
Domain expertise must include:
- Understanding and analyzing the needs
- Exploring technology possibilities for the problem
- Translating the business problem into a solution demand domain expertise.
Having deep domain knowledge assists the technology partner to build elegant solutions because:
- Domain knowledge helps in understanding the functional flow of the business and better understanding the business requirements concerning business problems.
- With domain knowledge, one can better understand user needs and design technology solutions accordingly.
- It helps in understanding the business nuances with clarity to influence technology choices.
- It helps to create solutions that deliver tangible business results.
Today most industries and customer behaviors are becoming more nuanced. Deep-tech products are usually for business-critical applications, deep domain expertise is the only way to ensure that they are relevant and robust and serve their purpose.
Ability to work on complex systems
Developing technology products is one thing. Ensuring that these products fit into the existing IT ecosystem seamlessly is another thing altogether.
Large, complex, and distributed systems, complex processes, legacy technologies, and systems are all a part of today’s reality. The banking industry, for example, wants to use the latest technologies such as AI to improve their business outcomes. However, often these new-age technologies have to sit in harmony with legacy systems and technologies. How can they work?
Selecting a technology partner who has the experience and expertise to work on complex systems ensures that they can deliver better solutions. This is so because they have a complete understanding of all the influencers and all the moving parts. This clarity helps them capably design clear project plans and roadmaps, make the right technology choices, and create the right solutions that meet the expected business outcomes.
Technology expertise
Technology expertise, quite naturally, has to be a focus area when selecting a technology partner. Evaluating the technical vocabulary of the organization and assessing their dexterity in technologies that are used to develop deep tech products such as AI, Machine Learning, RPA, and NLP is essential.
However, while the partner has to be assessed on their knowledge and experience in working with new technology, their proficiency in legacy technology cannot be ignored.
Technologies such as AI and machine learning are becoming mainstream and popular now. However, almost all organizations also have some legacy systems or technologies at play, and it might be too expensive or time-consuming to expect a complete overhaul. Technology expertise, hence, translates to the ability to use the ‘right’ technology and having no technology bias.
Cloud capabilities
Deep tech applications also have to be cloud-enabled to ensure increased availability, scalability, and performance. These systems and applications are also data-centric and hence need to leverage the cloud.
Evaluating the cloud capabilities of a technology partner, therefore, becomes essential. Assessing if they can create strong, cloud-enabled technology products that are performance-driven, highly scalable, and highly secure is an important metric to evaluate. Strong capabilities in cloud strategy, cloud migration, and cloud management come in handy since all applications today are now cloud-based.
Process orientation
If you want to identify a gentleman, look at his shoes. If you want to identify how good a technology partner is, look at its internal processes. The devil, always, lies in the little details.
Since the quality of a technology partner is only as good as its technologist's, it pays to take a look at their hiring process. This helps an organization looking to select a technology partner to evaluate if the technologists have the technical agility to work on complex projects. Assessing the impetus and processes surrounding project management, communication, and collaboration are important metrics because they influence project timelines.
Assessing how independently the technologists work, their creativity in solving problems, and the processes in place that help them operate to optimal efficiency also provide insights into the process ecosystem. This information helps in understanding how they approach, treat, and execute projects.
The benefits of getting a technology partner are many. Two of the most obvious ones are 1) access to deep technical expertise and 2) capacity to develop robust deep-tech products with agility.
We know that these above-mentioned capabilities are important qualities a technology partner should have. Leveraging these, we have developed robust, deep-tech, business-critical technology products that have helped many organizations deliver greater value every single time. Let’s connect.
