Every business I have ever walked into already has a technology strategy. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody approved it. It got built one vendor recommendation at a time, by people who were never asked to think about the business, only to sell what they sell.
That is not a criticism of vendors. A security vendor is supposed to recommend security tools. A cloud provider is supposed to recommend more cloud. An MSP is supposed to recommend whatever keeps the ticket queue calm. Every one of them is doing their job correctly. The problem is that nobody above them is doing a different job: deciding which of those recommendations the business actually needs, in what order, and why.
I have sat in rooms where a six-figure platform decision got made because a vendor's slide deck was good. Not because anyone compared it to what the business already owned. Not because anyone asked what it would cost to walk away from in three years. The deck was convincing, the timeline was tight, and nobody in the room had the job of saying "wait."
Here is the test I use with clients. Pull up your last five significant technology purchases. For each one, write down who proposed it. If the answer is a vendor more often than it is someone inside the business who owns outcomes, you do not have a technology strategy. You have a technology history, assembled by the people with the most reason to sell you something.
This is not an argument for distrusting vendors or slowing everything down with committees. It is an argument for a specific kind of ownership: someone whose job is to sit between the business and every vendor in the room, who has no commission riding on the answer, and whose only accountability is whether the decision was right for the business two years later. Most small and mid-sized companies do not have that person. They have a founder who is too busy, an IT lead who is too close to the tools, or nobody at all. The vendor relationship fills the vacuum because vacuums get filled.
The fix is not more process. It is a different seat at the table, one that outlasts any single vendor relationship and answers to the business, not to a quota.
Kevin M. Coles is a fractional CIO and the founder of Coles Technical Group, where he owns technology direction for companies that would rather have a strategy than a vendor history. More on how vendor-driven decisions quietly become the default: Should Vendors Define Your Technology Strategy?
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