Dancing with the Tech Stack

The Daily Dance

Every day unsolicited sales messages in the form of phone calls, emails, and LinkedIn invites arrive in my spaces. It’s a necessary dance as sales teams get their products and services to market for business to happen. But what’s at stake is more than just making a sale. Each of these sales calls wants to affect and influence how I make decisions about the tech stack within the organization I serve. The tech stack is the combination of technologies, tools, and frameworks used to build and run applications and services.  In other words, asking to change components in the tech stack is no small thing. 

Less is More

IT service providers will tell you that the best tech stack is a lean tech stack. The more stuff you cram in there, the messier it gets with data stores, integrations, and overall complexity. Duplication? Bad news. Unused components? Hidden costs just waiting to bite you. Integrating different components into the stack is usually more involved than estimated and way more complex than what the sales pitch tells you. 

So keep it simple. Here are some techniques for managing the stack that have worked well for me:

• Look for duplicate technology services/programs and consolidate if there is not an overriding reason to keep the duplication. 
•  Check for tech pieces that are underused. Lots of times, organizations only scratch the surface of the software they already have. Before you buy more stuff, see if you can get more value from what you’ve got.
• Identify tech services that aren’t pulling their weight. If they’re not worth the cost, they might be up for replacement or retirement.

• Find the gaps where a new tech service could add value to the services you provide. Permission to dance!

Onward and upward!

Image: Created by Microsoft Copilot on 11/18/24 with the prompt “Create an image of a man stacking large blocks on a desk.”