As you review your goals and projects for the year ahead, you may be facing some big technical decisions about how best to invest time, money and resources in 2024. Whether you’re expanding your core product, building a new application or on the lookout for new opportunities, the outcome of technical choices can impact your business over the long term.

Guiding these tough decisions is something Technical Operating Partner Debra Danielson does every day at Banyan. Tapping into more than 40  years of experience, she helps companies hone their strategies in the technology of business and the business of technology.

Here are three areas where she suggests software leaders turn their focus when weighing technology investments in 2024.

Depending on when you first developed your application, technology may have evolved significantly. But rewriting your software or upgrading your tech stack can be expensive, time consuming and resource intensive.

Before you rush to make any sweeping technical changes, Debra suggests taking a step back to review and sometimes refine your strategy. That’s because, in her experience, what can appear at face value to be technical problems may actually be business problems at their core.

She recently worked with Banyan company RinkNet to tackle one such challenge. As the leading hockey scouting and player management solution worldwide, RinkNet was exploring growth opportunities, which included developing a new application. Since their existing platform was built on older technology, the team needed to decide how much to invest in rewriting the core product functionality and developing the new app.

Recognizing these questions were more strategic than technical, Debra helped the team work toward identifying the best long-term opportunity. At the end of a one-day strategy session, they had the tools and motivation to hone a strategy that would make their technical decisions easier and more straightforward.

As your company grows, it may be time to identify opportunities to reduce spend and streamline your tech stack. But disrupting the status quo isn’t easy — and it can be difficult to get perspective when you are in the thick of running the business.

Debra says many businesses struggle with this challenge because it requires questioning some fundamental assumptions you’ve been operating on up until now. She encourages companies to try looking at their technical dilemmas with fresh eyes.

Working with Banyan business Camis, she helped the team uncover assumptions about their cloud solution that resulted in dramatically reduced costs. Camis delivers reservation and facilities management solutions for government-operated parks and campgrounds across Canada and the US. With hefty annual fees eating into profits, they had been working with their cloud provider to rein in expenses, but had made little progress.

One of the first things Debra did was walk the team through the service level agreement they had with customers to understand whether it aligned with the tier of services they were providing. As it turned out, only a segment of the application needed the level of high availability that Camis was paying for. After moving other parts of the application to normal availability infrastructure, the team was able to significantly reduce the cost of their cloud spending without impacting their customers or having to do a substantial re-architecture.

You may already have offshore and outsourced components of your business, or you may be looking at ways to leverage these practices in 2024. While there is potential to save costs and tap into new and larger talent markets, offshoring and outsourcing can be complicated with lots of ways to go wrong. So, if you’re looking to refine technical operations, it’s a good time to evaluate your strategy.

Debra took her first trip to India for an offshoring project in 2003 and has been involved with offshore and outsourced teams consistently for the last 20 years. In her experience, one of the biggest sources of dysfunction between offshore or outsourced teams and North American managers is rooted in cultural differences. These crossed wires can make it seem like an offshoring or outsourcing strategy is failing, but that’s usually not the case.

She says cultural factors have no impact on a worker’s technical skill level or ability to get the job done, but they can be barriers to good communication. In one example, Debra recalls North American managers being baffled by their Indian team’s tendency to overpromise on deadlines. But the perceived time management problem turned out to be a misunderstanding based on how managers were wording requests and expectations.

If you’re pursuing offshoring or outsourcing, Debra suggests educating managers about the cultural norms in the country where your teams are located. Doing the work upfront can enhance productivity, communication, employee satisfaction and success with your strategy.

When you’re up against what looks like a technical challenge, it can be tempting to find and implement a solution as quickly as possible, but that can lead to indiscriminate spending or hasty decision-making that cuts into your bottom line. Before investing in new tech solutions or personnel, take a critical eye to your strategy and question any assumptions that may be getting in the way of productivity or profitability.

Debra Danielson is the Technical Operating Partner at Banyan Software. She is responsible for technical diligence before and mentoring and coaching portfolio companies after acquisition. Debra is a non-executive director at FiVerity, a fraud-detection network for small and medium banks and credit unions, and at Action Title Research, a PE-backed real estate tech company. Prior to her current roles, Debra was CTO and Senior Vice President, Engineering, at Digital Guardian (DG) where she provided technical vision and strategic direction for the company’s 175-person engineering organization. She was one of the first seven distinguished engineers at CA Technologies, selected from over 4,000 technical employees. She also holds 27 patents in IT management and security disciplines.