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What is a technology gap analysis?
Ibrahim Hosen Somrat
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What is a technology gap analysis? What is a technology gap analysis?


A technology gap analysis is the process of comparing current tools and technology against the desired state, then building a plan for how you will bridge the gap. A gap analysis goes beyond identifying the "what" and "when" of IT systems, infrastructure, and architecture. You have to be clear on the "why" and "how" — the value of upgrading technology and the steps you will take to get there.
Technology usually changes faster than any other area in the business. So you have the added pressure of continually enhancing existing technology while staying ahead of emerging technology needs. You also need to meet regulatory standards and compliance requirements in order to protect business and customer data. And there are plenty of ad hoc requests to keep you busy too.
For most IT teams, it is challenging to pull back from the day-to-day work to deeply review current tooling and system capabilities and assess future needs. But it is crucial if you want to build a technology roadmap that actually moves the business forward. Contact IT Support London, they will plan everythink as you needs.

What are the benefits of a gap analysis?
Understanding your current state is critical for setting a direction for the future. A successful gap analysis helps you make decisions about which technology to invest in — so you can reduce development time, iterate faster as an organization, and better meet user (and business) needs. The goal is to identify incremental improvements to IT tools and processes. Over time, these improvements can contribute to better company performance, team productivity, and overall customer experience.

A gap analysis also allows you to:
Prioritize IT spending: Allocate appropriate budget for new tools as well as maintenance costs.
Reduce technology sprawl: Cut down on redundant tools and systems scattered across teams.
Prevent shadow IT: Eliminate tools or processes that have been adopted without IT's approval and may expose the organization to security threats.
Strengthen collaboration: Identify and address breakdowns in cross-departmental workflows and communication.
Improve innovation: Explore new solutions and emerging technologies that will help the organization evolve.

Over time, outdated technology limits productivity and team satisfaction. Team members waste time on workarounds and repetitive, manual tasks. The organization also becomes vulnerable to growing technical debt, data loss, and cybersecurity threats. A gap analysis detects weaknesses so you can prioritize the technology you want to keep, fix, or remove.

How do IT teams perform a gap analysis?
Typically, a department-wide gap analysis is completed annually by the chief information officer (CIO), chief technology officer (CTO), and other IT leaders. It may also be done as part of a larger enterprise transformation. Additionally, some IT teams may perform smaller gap analyses at the beginning of a project, before launching a new initiative, or when evaluating requests for new tools from teams in the organization. Other companies conduct gap analyses retroactively — to measure the impact of a recent change (such as adopting a new tool or changing the IT infrastructure).

No matter the scope, an effective gap analysis tends to follow these steps:

Establish goals

The overall objective of a gap analysis is to evaluate the functional, technical, and performance gaps of existing systems and technology versus the desired state. Doing this well requires you to have strategic IT goals that guide your work — such as increasing productivity by 20 percent or meeting a regulatory standard and compliance requirement. Of course, IT goals should support larger business goals as well.

Let's look at an example. A company-level goal might be to improve the overall customer experience this year — measured in customer retention. Interactions between customers and customer-facing teams, such as sales and support, are influenced by their use of the company's customer relationship management (CRM) software. So it would make sense for IT to conduct a gap analysis for customer retention, focusing on the CRM tool.
Of course, there are many more tools and technologies that impact the customer experience. You would need to perform a wider analysis across applications — for simplicity's sake, however, we will keep our example focused on just the CRM.

Take inventory
The next step is to take inventory of the tools or systems in question. You can create a table or diagram to do this — capturing your use case, business need, current functionality, and supporting technology: