Historically, IT has been considered as mere backend function so as to support the main business. But with the passing of time, it has established itself as an inseparable part of the core business. Thus, it has become imperative to measure how IT provide affects the top and the bottom line in the financial reports, thereby integrating technology strategy with the core strategy. This relationship between the business value and the technology operations is established by Technology Value Operating Model (TOM). Quite literally, TOM is defined as the blueprint or the integrated operational system that allows the business to convey technology strategy into measurable outcomes. In simple words, TOM is the connective issue between the business strategy and technology execution.
Technology Value Operating Model allows to understand as to how the different components of the value chain such as people, processes, digital platforms (data & AI), financial taxonomies and governance work coherently to translate technology investments into revenue growth, efficiency and competitive advantage. A modern TOM will allow the businesses to reorganize the technology around various business value streams, products and outcomes.
In the recent years, every organization, irrespective of the size and composition, is investing heavily on data and AI due to the exhibition of exceptional task completion abilities of the large language models. But only a handful of them are able to translate those investments into concrete business value and one of the major reasons in the gap between the modern strategic ambitions and the legacy ways of working. Therefore, a modern Technology Value Operating Model is needed to close the gap, scale the systems, accelerate the innovations, improved coordination between various business silos, and accelerate the outcome realization.
Technology Value Strategy Model has four core domains that bridges the gap between strategy and execution:
Product Teams : Cross-functional teams consisting of business product owners, software engineers, and domain experts aligned around persistent customer or employee offerings. They focus on continuous value creation and customer outcomes rather than transient, project-based deadlines.
Platform Teams : Dedicated technical teams responsible for modernizing core backbone systems, infrastructure, data architectures, and reusable APIs. They provide self-service capabilities that allow product teams to deploy features quickly without reinventing core infrastructure.
Value Streams & Multimodal Delivery : Structures the enterprise into parallel value streams such as customer-interfacing technology (frontline agility), business process technology (core backbone systems), and operational technology. Work is delivered through multimodal delivery paths, combining sequential/gate-based methods for large-scale changes with agile/incremental development flows (such as DevOps or SAFe) for rapid iteration.
Value realization remains one of the core problem to be solved for technology strategy. Embracing the modern Techonology Strategy Operating Model is definitely a way to address the issue at hand. Correction of execution requires accurate measure of what is wrong, resources to tackle the road blocks and identification of alternative solutions that enable business to be resilient to the rapid technological changes.