The Key to Developing an IT Roadmap: The Grand Finale

Last week in How to Develop an Effective IT Roadmap we focused was on the first stage of developing the IT Roadmap.  This article delves deeply into the final steps for completing this task. 

We left off at defining the four key areas where your strategic initiatives should fall into.  The four buckets consist of projects that “Keep the Lights On,” “Revenue Generating” projects, projects that provide “Efficiency Gains,” and the last bucket is “Operating Cost Reductions.” 

Each of the key areas is described below.

Keep the Lights On (KTLO): These projects are necessary to keep the environment maintained.  Maintenance may include hardware and software upgrades, procedure and policy development, or organization changes. These projects typically do not provide revenue opportunities but are necessary to keep the environment operating effectively and efficiently.

Efficiency Gains: Projects that contain Efficiency Gains provide the opportunity for the organization to work more effectively and efficiently.  These projects often consist of eliminating manual processes and move towards automation so that staff members can be re-allocated to more value added tasks.

Revenue Generating: These initiatives are projects that provide the ability for the organization to utilize new applications, new processes, or new tools that enable the organization to increase company revenues.  These projects typically are high priority due to the impact that they have on the financials.

Operating Cost Reductions: These projects provide Operating Cost Reductions and consist of projects that will provide the organization the ability to reduce the costs for doing business. These reductions may include contracts that are renegotiated (example: IT Infrastructure or support agreements), or projects that provide valuable data that may provide insight into how existing processes and procedures can be modified.

Provided below are examples of the projects that fit into each category.

Keep the Lights On (KTLO) – Maintaining the Business:

• Infrastructure enhancements for high availability, redundancy and failover
• Applications Maintenance
• Disaster Recovery
• Hardware Refresh

Revenue Generation - Enable the business to create revenues:

• Implement Salesforce.com for the sales teams management of the sales process
• Applications that provide profitability information
• Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing reporting systems that provide data that will enable the business to make decisions based on revenues

Efficiency Gains - Increase employee efficiencies and reduce manual labor:

• Projects that eliminate manual work resulting in the redeployment of staff to more value added projects
• Virtualization & storage enhancements

Operating Cost Reductions- Projects that reduce the cost of doing business:

• Review all maintenance contracts and find opportunities for consolidation and reductions

The next step in the process is to define your key initiatives at a high level. 

An example of this includes:

Advanced Analytical Reporting

• Ability to make business decisions based on the most recent data available
• Ability to have data available anytime, anywhere for the sales force

Development of new products or processes

• Ability to take the information presented through the IT systems and make business decisions that will result in new products or services
• Ability to take the information that is available in the IT systems and identify predictable, repeatable issues that can be identified for resolution.

Consolidation & Efficiency

• Reduce complexity of workflows for speed of delivery & increased throughput
• Reduce infrastructure footprint  (power, cooling, space)
• Replacement of legacy IT systems with strategic investments

Business Continuity

• Development of Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery capabilities for IT systems
• Increased Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery capability for the Supply Chain

Speed

• Adopt new technologies faster than the competitors
• New consumer technologies must be available to the staff
• New business initiatives should take precedence over IT projects

Network

• Internet redundancy resulting in the elimination of downtime.  Eliminates the possibility of orders not being placed in your system.

Now that all of the key areas have been identified and described, the next step is to provide a project description sheet for each new project.  Provided on the next page is an example of a template that I have used when building Roadmaps.

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.

(Shutterstock image credit: Roadmap)