Chris Trottier on Nostr: So a question came up: **Your digital strategy encounters unexpected technical ...

So a question came up: **Your digital strategy encounters unexpected technical hurdles. How will you pivot to ensure success?**

Okay, so when I think about this, there are three typical reasons why you might encounter unexpected technical hurdles.

## A) You think you understand the technology, but in fact, you don’t.

In this case, the best way to pivot is to learn how everything works. That might mean pausing your digital strategy and assessing: “What is it that I think I know, but I actually don’t?”

This is something often encountered by folks suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. And let me be clear: Dunning-Kruger doesn’t mean people think they’re smarter than they actually are—that’s not the point of it. What Dunning-Kruger essentially says is that intelligent people, even ones with tremendous expertise, often have an outsized opinion of their understanding in other disciplines.

For example, you might be an expert in law. And because you’re an expert in law, you might have an outsized opinion of your ability to understand things that are unrelated to your discipline. If you’re a lawyer—a good lawyer at that—you might think it would be easy for you to understand engineering.

So, the point here is that it’s important to assess what you don’t understand, try to understand it, and if you can’t, consult with somebody who does.

## B) You don’t have the digital infrastructure to support your digital strategy.

For example, you might think you have the disk space to host a certain amount of owned content, but in reality, you quickly discover your strategy means you need to use a lot more data. What you think is only five gigabytes of data ends up being a terabyte—and yes, I’ve seen that happen.

So the answer to how to pivot when you encounter the problem of infrastructure is either to acquire better infrastructure or to pare back your ambitions and try to make your digital strategy work with the infrastructure you do have.

## C) Your data and infrastructure aren’t owned by you.

This is, sadly, the most common hurdle. What happens is people hitch their flag to a cloud service, and then guess what? It unexpectedly gets shut down. Your access to that data gets unexpectedly shut down.

We recently had a high-profile case of this with a company called Bench Accounting. Without warning, Bench Accounting pulled the plug on their service, and 35,000 paying customers found themselves without access to important files. And these were critical files—because guess what? If you’re dealing with accounting, you’re dealing with the literal lifeblood of your business.

So, what I think needs to happen is businesses—and consumers too—need to start getting religion about hosting their own services. And I’m not just talking about the old-school method of installing a WordPress processor on your computer, though that’s probably a good idea.

What I mean is:
* We need to get religion about backups. Create lots and lots of backups. Back up everything on your hard drive.
* It’s about time we invest in a NAS (network-attached storage).
* It’s about time we start hosting services on that NAS—business-critical applications like accounting, office tools, project management, CRM, and even social media.

It’s time for the world to wake up and understand the value of owned services. In other words: be your own cloud.

Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, I have confidence in Google, Microsoft, and Apple.” Well, guess what? All those companies pull the plug on business-critical applications. Google is renowned for its graveyard—there’s even a site called the Google Graveyard dedicated to all the services they’ve discontinued. Hell, they just recently discontinued Jamboard, and that was a pretty critical service for a lot of businesses.

**To recap**: How should you pivot to ensure success?
1. Understand the things you don’t understand.
2. Work with or upgrade to the required infrastructure.
3. Own your data—be your own cloud.