Post written by

Forbes Technology Council

Every business faces challenges in growth and development as their teams, market needs and other factors change. Companies in the technology industry face the added challenge of rapid product advancements and ever-evolving consumer demands.

As a tech business, you’ve likely identified your biggest pain point that you want to resolve this year. As insurmountable as this obstacle may seem, it’s possible to move past it with the right plan in place. Get inspired by these 11 Forbes Technology Council members, who explained their company’s biggest challenge and how they’re going to overcome it.

1. Educating Clients On Emerging Technologies 

Today, we can incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) to make mobile experiences more intelligent, anticipate users’ desire and needs and present information in the context that we couldn’t several months ago. We need to focus on educating our clients on the value of new technology. Every customer comes to the table with a different set of challenges, so it’s our job to keep up with tech and help educate them. – Sanjay Malhotra, Clearbridge Mobile

2. Using Machine Learning To Meet Evolving Needs 

We are aligning our entire product to better meet the needs of an evolving student demographic. This will surface in many significant improvements to our core offerings. To do this, we are leaning heavily on machine learning and advanced language processing tech to build an offering that will not only be immediately beneficial to students but will also continue to improve itself over time. – Gregor Carrigan, Course Hero

3. Balancing Innovation And Growth 

One of the challenges we face is how to continue to grow with existing strategies while being agile enough to experiment and innovate to fuel the next growth wave. One of the tools that has been helpful in this initiative is the RICE framework. It enables flexibility of prioritization and resource management on a wide array of investments we can use to accelerate short/long-term growth. – Pratik Bhadra, Bluecore

4. Automating Everything 

Going through International Organization of Standardization (ISO) certification and capability maturity model integration (CMMI) appraisal has underscored the need for more automation. Many processes would be adopted faster and more widely with convenient automation methods which would streamline the work of individual employees. Our solution was creating software that tackles this. It is now in beta testing, and will soon add that extra automation that is needed in our workflows. – Maxim Garkavtsev, Qarea Limited, Testfort Inc 

5. Rapid Hiring In A Fiercely Competitive Market 

We are in a talent war with the biggest companies on the planet. We attack this problem in many ways, but one of the most effective is not asking someone’s zip code when we find the right person. We believe that a person is more important than geographical location. This requires a lot of effort both in our culture and with our systems, but it is well worth it to find the right people. – Billy Bosworth, DataStax

6. Combining Data From Disparate Systems 

Many companies operate in multiple disparate software systems rather than compromise on a single system that may not be best of breed in any category. An operations challenge we face is combining actionable data from multiple systems into a single Dashboard. We will be exploring Microsoft Power BI to give us cohesive business intelligence. – Micheal Goodwin, Server@Work, LLC