How to Develop an Effective IT Roadmap

All IT organizations require a roadmap that matches short-term and long-term goals with specific technology solutions.

Developing a roadmap assists organizations with identifying the projects that enable the business to achieve their strategic goals, and provides a mechanism for IT to forecast the technology needs that map to the business goals and objectives.  This framework should be developed or reviewed annually. 

Many organizations develop a three to five year roadmap. However, with the rate of changes in technology, I have found that writing a technology roadmap has to be done annually or modified annually if one exists.

The roadmap should be developed with the input from all areas of the business as each area has their separate set of needs to meet their organization's objective.  The roadmap that I am speaking about in this document is strictly for IT and focuses on the areas of applications and infrastructure.

The outline that I have used that has been the most useful and well received defines the mission for the IT organization, such as “The mission of the IT organization is to be a world class organization providing business value through technology solutions delivered on time, on budget, and high quality solutions.” 

This article is the first of a series that will provide insight on how to develop your Roadmap and achieve the desired results (i.e. sign off) for moving forward with achieving the desired results for your organization. The most successful IT Roadmaps are driven with a clear understanding of why it is needed the priorities and goals which often include:

Risk and Control – Minimizing IT service disruption with repeatable process and eliminating staff heroics.

Cost Optimization – Repeatable processes which allow for more efficient delivery. Maturity facilitates IT investment decisions optimized with quantitative information about demand, capacity and service quality.

Internal Customer Satisfaction - Establishing delivery and service credibility with IT service consumers; demonstrating continuous improvement.

Facilitating Business Agility – Delivering change-resilient solutions; risks understood to allow for faster environment re-configuration.

Communicating formal maturity achievement – Demonstrating IT maturity at the right price-point.

Next I address the Guiding Principles for how the roadmap will be developed. 

Laura Paoletti holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Information Systems and has been the Vice President of Information Technology at NBC-Universal and Disney ABC Television.  She has also held positions at Ernst & Young LLP in the Technology practice.  In her role she has been responsible for Applications, Infrastructure and Digital Media.  Some of her notable accomplishments include the implementation of applications for Digital Media, Marketing, Finance, Manufacturing (supply chain), Sales and Consumer Products; Implementation of Enterprise Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence systems; Data Center management, including hardware, storage strategies, digital libraries and data center expansion; Implementation of a Project Management office; and Business transformation from a tape to a tapeless environment (digital media).

See here for all of Laura's Tom's IT Pro articles.

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