A tech stack is a set of technologies businesses use to build web and mobile applications. It’s also helpful in building a website. A tech stack consists of two elements: the front and back end.
The front end is where clients or users interact within the website. It focuses on buttons, graphics, fonts, and everything users see when they click on the website. Examples of elements that make up the front end include: Cascading style sheet (CSS), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and JavaScript.
On the flip side, the back end entails everything that happens on the server side of the technology. This, ideally, is the inner workings of the application or website. Its components include a framework like Laravel, a database like MongoDB, programming languages like python, and a server like the Internet Information Services (IIS).
Essentially, the structure of a tech stack is like that of a human. In this regard, your face and body roles are similar to the front end’s. On the flip side, your organs, muscles, and skeleton make the back end.
Also, you wouldn’t want to underrate the importance of tech stack optimization since it ensures that you create value out of your business. Hence, if you’re interested in optimizing your tech stack, read on!
1. Have An IT Landscape Plan
The first step to enable you to achieve proper tech stack optimization is taking stock of the things you have in place. You need to ensure that you’re thorough and accurate when doing this. That said, you need to check and include all dependencies, IT components, interfaces, and connections. It’s best to check these with the optimization idea to help you identify the elements in suitable condition and those needing replacement.
Other things that you need to capture in your plan include the following:
The owner of the different elements in the stack
The part of the business the different features support
Each application’s pace layer
The stage (life cycle) of each element
The interdependencies of the various elements
The pathways of the data flow in the stack
After jotting down this information, you can add graphics and pictures to make it visual. Hence, it would be best to show the redundancies, connections, and opportunities in a well-laid-out landscape map.
2. Do Proper Research
After making the landscape plan, it’s best to research what you’re lacking and ways to improve your tech stack. For instance, if you want to enhance your organization’s finance department, you’d like to check out some of the best finance software you can adopt.
Also, it would be wise to analyze the current market pain points and set clear objectives and goals to meet your prospective customer needs. So ideally, the research should help you establish the following:
Your end goal
The challenges and roadblocks that you’re currently facing or are likely to face
The elements that you want in your application or software
With proper research, a clear goal, and landscaped map, you are a few steps away from having one of the most influential tech stacks.
3. Eliminate Out-Of-Date Structures
It’s highly recommended that you get rid of short-term structures and outdated siloes. This is because they have outlived their intended purpose. In essence, you’d want to avoid repeating processes that aren’t bringing profits and positive outcomes in your firm.
If you have no idea what applications and structures to do away with, you can consider software like Enterprise Application Software that can help eliminate e-waste. This application is effective because it covers almost all aspects of the organization and, thus, fulfills business needs.
In as much as they can help you recognize the siloes structures to eliminate, they may not do it 100% effectively. Hence, you can liaise with IT specialists and other top managers in different departments of your company to discuss and have a unanimous agreement on the unneeded items that need to be removed.
The result of doing away with these outdated structures is:
Increased efficiency
Enhanced customer experience
Reduced expenses and costs
These are some of the ways of achieving tech stack maximization.
4. Look At All Possibilities Of What Has Affected Your Business
It’s easy to think you’re not using the right technology. Because of this, your business may fail to thrive and flourish as it should. Also, your business may have been on an upward trend, but it suddenly started going down.
When this happens, you need to be open-minded and look at all the possibilities of why that is happening. You’d also want to ascertain whether you genuinely need technology to fix the issue.
Many times, the skills of the people in the business organization are the ones that affect the organization’s performance. There’s a high probability that you may have recently hired a semi-skilled or unskilled person, and thus, the reason why your organization’s performance is on a downward trend.
So, the technology, machines, and tools your business invests in don’t matter if your labor force doesn’t know how to use them. This is because they wouldn’t be as effective as they should be. Therefore, the best thing to do is to invest in training your labor force to become familiar with the use of the technologies in your organization. Otherwise, failure to do that can cause you to experience the same problems year in and year out.
5. Ensure That All Your Tools Are Integrated
You must ensure that you’ve integrated all the elements and tools of your tech stack to work together. Operations from one lead funnel’s end to the next should be seamless.
To achieve this, you can invest in getting a technical lead to oversee the technical personnel at your company and lead them in optimizing your tech stack. It would be best to advise them to avoid loosely connecting tools. Thus, they should integrate them with a proper plan to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
Conclusion
A tech stack has a summary of frameworks, programming languages, and tools that a software developer integrates with an application. To achieve tech stack optimization, it’s essential that you: eliminate outdated siloes, check all factors that might have affected your business performance, integrate all the necessary components, and not forget to do ample research.
Always remember that a flexible and optimized tech stack will help you better manage software systems, and you’ll get a better return on technology investments.
