Shift your tech strategy

Just 27% of our survey respondents report that their technology is fully aligned with business goals.

Competing priorities are often at fault when technology fails to align with business objectives.

“Business leaders recognize the need to invest in technology to enhance the customer experience, improve operations and drive profitability,” said Grant Thornton National Managing Principal Technology Modernization Services Nick Vellani. “But they are competing with their internal technology function's priorities. These may include infrastructure and application cloud migration, cybersecurity, and data management — all of which are critical to ongoing operations but do not directly align to business priorities.”

One university healthcare system recently sought to align enterprise strategy with patient and revenue drivers for consideration in selecting a new CRM. Grant Thornton Business Consulting Principal David Koppy said, “Our client wanted to ensure this major technology investment fully accounted for the complexity of the business. We drove alignment between business and technology leaders through structured decision-making on business value levers, which were subsequently articulated into business requirements.”

Companies with misaligned technology often include:

• Companies — particularly smaller ones — that are using outdated or even antiquated systems that no longer meet their needs.
• Companies that have made major investments in total system upgrades but are discouraged because they bought the technology without considering their business needs. One survey respondent even said their technology was obsolete by the time it was implemented.
• Companies that have invested in multiple disconnected systems or acquired disparate systems through M&A.

To drive success and growth, leaders in all three groups need to ensure that both their systems and their data are aligned to support future initiatives. Our survey showed that 32% of respondents think their data needs improvement to support technology initiatives, with only 16% rating their data quality as “excellent.” With the right systems and data in place, leaders need to connect those technology initiatives directly with business outcomes and customer experience (CX) improvements that lead to increased revenue.

In today's business climate, organizations must prioritize investments that deliver the highest returns and align with strategic goals. Success requires a clear focus on objectives such as cost savings, growth, efficiency or market differentiation — while filtering out initiatives that don’t directly contribute to these outcomes. Collaboration is essential. Input from leaders, IT teams and end users ensures that decisions address key needs and align across the organization. Balancing short-term wins with long-term goals and adopting flexible funding models helps businesses stay adaptable to changing priorities.

Managing risk is equally important. Approaches such as pilot programs and thorough assessments reduce exposure to potential challenges. Regular reviews ensure that investments remain relevant as needs and market conditions evolve.

Fostering innovation through training, clear communication and change management supports smooth adoption of new technologies, driving organizational growth and agility.

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By more than a 2-to-1 margin, leaders in our survey are planning add-ons or upgrades to existing systems rather than complete system overhauls.

Many companies are driving strong revenue growth at an affordable price by auditing and optimizing their existing platforms instead of making large-scale new investments. One Fortune 100 tech firm increased marketing capacity by 44% by working with Grant Thornton to prioritize customer-centric personalization within existing systems.

Macro Trend: Economic uncertainty demands cautious capital deployment — optimizing current investments minimizes risk and maximizes returns.

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Cost reduction is the leading ROI metric, despite being a lagging indicator that’s poorly suited for real-time understanding of tech’s impact.

Focusing on real-time technology usage analytics, rather than retrospective ROI, enables proactive growth. Many business leaders have recognized this, yet our survey shows most still prioritize ROI metrics rather than tracking solution usage and adoption. Technology that’s not fully used falls short of growth and profitability goals, so leaders have a responsibility to make sure employees and customers alike use technology to its fullest potential. Usage metrics can quickly identify successful initiatives or needed pivots, such as the need for better training.

“We expect to go strong with digital transformation, and we expect to have some pushback from our teams,” said one survey respondent who’s a vice president of a company in the energy industry. “But we are focusing on training/information sharing so our users have a good experience.”

For example, while many companies use robust tax software applications to support their tax compliance functions, it is common for tax departments to underutilize standard, available application programming interfaces (APIs) that make the applications most effective. When APIs are used, an application can integrate more effectively with the company’s data to drive enhanced automation — resulting in increased cost savings and improved quality.

Metrics showing how often the team uses available APIs surrounding an application can indicate how effectively the application is being deployed and identify opportunities for additional value creation. Performing an optimization analysis can help companies identify usage gaps with these tools.

Focusing exclusively on cost-based ROI metrics — without attention to usage-based metrics — not only reduces effectiveness of the technology but can also create quality and compliance risks in the areas where the technologies are deployed. Staying with the example of the tax function, tax departments increasingly are relying on automation and AI to support critical tasks such as taxability determinations. Failure to effectively use the technology’s full capabilities can result in improper reporting, creating risks for the company and reducing the overall quality of the tax function’s work.

Although business leaders often don’t talk about tax strategy as an opportunity for growth, using scenario modeling to predict the tax implications of a changing tax law or a business expansion can save hundreds of hours — resulting in faster decisions and freeing up professionals to spend time on strategic planning versus manual calculation.

“AI also can contribute to strategy by analyzing tax positions to determine if alternatively available methodologies might create tax savings,” said Grant Thornton National Tax Solutions Leader Dana Lance. “Using emerging technologies removes the human time constraint from these tasks, ensuring savings opportunities are not missed and reporting compliance maintains high quality and accuracy.”

While leaders are focused on cost reduction metrics, user adoption is the biggest threat to technology’s success.

After the requisite cybersecurity, CRMs and customer interfaces are the top technologies that leaders said they will be investing in this year.

Organizations that center digital transformation around customer experience see clearer paths to revenue growth. With generative AI initiatives in particular, businesses initially implemented technology internally out of fear of exposing customers to potential AI-delivered mistakes that could harm brand reputation. But now that they have developed guardrails around AI use, companies are using customer-facing AI platforms to satisfy customers — who are enjoying the personalization that AI provides. Our survey underscores the shift to customer-centric CRMs and interfaces.

Macro Trend: Consumer spending shifts due to economic pressures require responsive, CX-focused strategies to maintain and grow revenue.

Integration challenges remain the leading obstacle that our survey respondents expect to face with their technology.

Integrating technology into an interconnected ecosystem helps businesses maximize the impact of their investments. That’s why enterprise platforms such as ERPs and CRMs are among the top technologies that business leaders are targeting for investment this year. However, businesses often struggle with insufficient integrations that lead to cross-functional handoffs and collaboration risks.

When organizations successfully integrate CRMs, marketing automation, e-commerce and customer service platforms, they can create a 360-degree view of the customer with personalized interactions at every touchpoint. AI-powered insights can inform product development, inventory management and demand forecasting — aligning operational capabilities with customer expectations. Organizations can integrate these insights with ERP or other business solutions to drive decisions and actions.

“Integrating from multiple business units into data repositories where we can extract what’s useful —instead of digging for nuggets of useful information — will allow us to make company-wide decisions proactively,” said a banking industry president responding to our survey.

Data is the currency of modern business operations, and making data-driven decisions at the enterprise level is a hefty challenge that many organizations continue to face. An enterprise needs a data strategy that unifies a single version of truth with master data management to underpin technologies that include large data storage platforms, data integration platforms and data lakes and lakehouses.

Building a data-driven culture goes beyond adopting technology; it entails aligning processes, behaviors and mindsets to prioritize and leverage the value of data:

• Clarify the importance of leveraging data for achieving business goals.
• Implement tools for data analysis and visualization, and train, train, train.
• Ensure data quality, security and compliance through clear policies.
• Make integrated data accessible across the organization with a critical focus on data security.
• Normalize using data to support decisions.
• Track adoption metrics and refine strategies based on feedback.