What are your business goals? Are you a service provider who might be able to reach a wider audience—and, by extension, a larger customer base—by sharing your knowledge through a blog, podcasts, or webinars? Do you have a product that you’d like to see distributed beyond your immediate geographic region, and perhaps even internationally? As you plot a roadmap for meeting these goals, think about the strategies needed to get there. The right technologies can make it easier to implement those strategies successfully.

But you need to make any technology choices with great care. “It’s critical that you don’t buy technology just because it looks like the right thing. It needs to fit into your vision for how you’re going to change the way your organization is working,” says George Westerman, principal research scientist at the MIT-Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy, and co-author, of Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation.

Automation technology (e.g., the cloud), for example, can:

• help your employees to make better decisions
• improve response to internal and/or customer issues
• speed transactions, and
• link you more closely to customers

The cloud, social media, mobile, and analytics allow companies to completely change the way they engage with customers, completely change their internal operations, and also completely change their business models, Westerman adds. “But the key is, figure out what the technology can do to your business, and then make that happen.”

Learn more about Disruption vs. Evolution and Finding the Right Technology