Every company needs to become a tech company.

In the wake of tech and pandemic driven disruption, one trend became clear – every company needs to become a tech company.

Whether it’s been the shift to online working, the spike in online demand, or the increase in cyber assaults, technology has emerged as a critical business capability. And for the same reasons, there has been no shortage of technology-transformation initiatives, all of them with good intentions and promising payoffs.

But too often companies focus on a series of initiatives without accounting for crucial dependencies that need to be in place to enable the change. Simply migrating systems to the cloud without also thoughtfully implementing cyber strategy, agile, and DevOps, for example, would leave a company unable to take advantage of the automation, scale, and flexibility that cloud-based systems offer. Modernizing the architecture, for example, changes how development teams deploy to it; using old methods results in errors and delays.

Successful transformations, frontload activities that unlock value quickly. Those activities can include agile sourcing strategies, clean-sheeting the portfolio, or optimizing the balance of engineering and non-engineering roles—changes that often unlock immediate value.