Zhen Tao, CIO at Paycor

How do you determine whether or not an idea is worth pursuing?

“I often think through what the biggest hitters are. We want to do things that are profitable for us, that are big enough and that will align with our existing and future capabilities. Those are the three big measures. Number one is deciding whether there is a good return out of it, and we measure that by customer demand. It’s not just about what it means to us, but about who the users are; who will find it helpful, useful and be willing to pay for it.

The second area is the size of the opportunity; we can’t do too many of those small things. In the big picture, doing many small things doesn’t really add to what we want to achieve. Instead of trying to do everything, thinking big and getting to a few of the big hitters helps us to stay focused.

Last, but also very important is what we can do. This is not measured just by what we can do today, but also what we can develop into. So this may involve some leapfrogging into the uncharted; it can be many steps away from our existing strategy and strengths. We must think about how we will extend ourselves, which gets into risk mitigation and management, but it’s all about gaining a realistic view of possibilities and our effectiveness in getting there.

A good example of this occurred about three years ago when Googles Glass came out. We were asking ourselves about the possibilities there; should we use some facial recognition in our reception area for greeting visitors by name, helping with security, and so on. But we had to consider how quickly that curve would present itself to the technology world and the user base. Even though some competitors were experimenting with it, we decided not to pursue it at the time and it subsequently died. It wasn’t the fashion, while something like the Apple Watch, with time has become more established. Other technologies, like mobile for example, which everyone believes in, is a sort of no-brainer. We want to be comfortable with the things we test and put to market in terms of both our capabilities and with a wide adoption in our customer base.”