What Is an IT Roadmap? (Features, Benefits, and Example)

Roadmaps help organizations plot where they want to go and how to get there — and technology can be a great aid for achieving business goals. However, knowing the best way to use technology can be tricky.

Fortunately, IT roadmaps can help. These are frameworks that organizations use to determine how best to utilize technological solutions to further their business objectives. Continue reading to discover what an IT roadmap is, how it might be useful, and how to make one.

 

IT Roadmap: Definition

An IT roadmap is a type of technology roadmap. It’s a technology project planning tool that highlights how an organization intends to use technology to achieve its goals. Basically, it’s a chart or graphic a company can share between departments to help everyone push toward the same goal — and how they can use technology to do it.

Organizations use IT roadmaps as strategic blueprints to develop and share their plans for technology initiatives. These plans might include migrating the company’s data to a new cloud system, achieving a digital transformation, or upgrading to a new enterprise software platform. Different organizations tailor their roadmaps to suit their specific needs. Having a widely shared roadmap fosters a healthy level of transparency and can build trust among relevant stakeholders.

 

What’s the Difference Between an IT Roadmap and a Product Roadmap?

There are several different types of roadmaps companies use to achieve various goals. Apart from the technology roadmap, there’s the product roadmap. 

An organization might use a product roadmap to chart the development and release of software or hardware products. A product roadmap can fulfill the specific goals of creating and realizing a product, whereas the goal of a technology roadmap could be a less tangible business objective. This might be increasing efficiency or generating more conversions.

 

Benefits of an IT Roadmap

There are several potential advantages of IT roadmap creation. These include:

 

Streamlined Decision Making

Decision making takes time and resources. Even if they’re only mental resources, decision-making can require a lot of labor. How much easier would your life be if every time you were faced with a tough work decision, you could simply refer to a company-wide policy that basically tells you what to do? 

That’s what a successful IT roadmap can accomplish. It’s difficult to figure out what goal or initiative to prioritize sometimes, but with a technology roadmap pointing everyone in the same direction, it’s easier to know the best way forward.

 

Better Technology Investments and Budgeting

Better decision-making can be a tremendous advantage when it’s just staff making better choices quicker for their specific tasks and responsibilities. When those responsibilities involve deciding how and where to spend company money, this improved decision-making is an even bigger benefit.

There are so many IT solutions out there an organization could invest in that the options are nearly infinite — but budgets are not. Knowing which IT options offer the most advantages and best returns can be tough. The right technological solution depends on the specific goal a business wants to achieve. 

 

More Effective Resource Allocation

An IT roadmap focuses a business on its strategic goals, reducing the chances of new technology distracting decision-makers unnecessarily. This means spending less time and money on something that won’t bring the organization closer to achieving its goals.

This goes beyond staying within budgets. It helps organizations figure out how to delegate tasks more efficiently. IT teams can more narrowly and strategically deploy their efforts by following a well-crafted roadmap.

 

Helps Technology Systems Run Smoothly

When IT operators can take a quick look at a strategy roadmap and understand their responsibilities and mission, they are much likelier to stay on task. Including items such as internal system upgrades and software license renewals helps make everything run smoothly and ensures continuity.

 

Types of IT Roadmaps

There’s more than one type of IT roadmap. These different types can serve different business objectives and help different departments. Some notable IT roadmap types include:

  • Enterprise: For an organization-wide, overarching master plan, consider an enterprise IT roadmap. The goal of this type of technology roadmap is to align every IT initiative with the company’s strategic objectives. An enterprise roadmap outlines long-term goals and projects and looks to execute a strategic plan over a years-long period, such as 3 or 5 years.
  • Project: An IT project roadmap has more of a project management approach. It outlines an organization’s tech projects from inception to completion, including the key components, milestones, and timelines. This roadmap gives IT operations a clear picture of what they need to further a project’s progress and can help other departments understand what the IT team is doing and why.
  • Architecture: This roadmap provides a strategic plan for architecting and maintaining an effective IT infrastructure. An architecture roadmap displays the key components of an organization’s product suite. It’s the task of a designated software architect to build this software. Many companies find it helpful to create their own dedicated IT architecture roadmaps. This way, their architecture teams can see their strategic projects independent of any product-related initiatives that might be present on an enterprise IT roadmap. An architecture roadmap could also be useful in facilitating a digital transformation for an organization.
  • Engineering: An engineering roadmap is a high-level overview of a business’s plans and strategic objectives for developing a product. It’s a type of product roadmap. For a software company, the engineering roadmap would help the architects and developers create a software product for sale.

 

How To Create a Strategic IT Roadmap

Not every technology roadmap requires different creation phases. Similarly, your overarching goals will also affect your creation process. Irrespective of your specific objectives, here are a few broad steps you can take to create an effective IT roadmap:

  • Assess where you are: To know how to get where you want to go, you must figure out where you are. The first step is to assess your existing IT infrastructure and applications. This might include your customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software, your security setup, and system capabilities. This may require assembling a team across different departments, such as IT, operations, and various business teams. It’s prudent to catalog your organization’s inventory of systems, hardware, software, and cloud-based solutions. Conducting a gap analysis can reveal where you need to improve.
  • Define your objectives: The next step in creating a technology roadmap is to state your goal. Outline the company’s overall vision and the strategic goals it hopes to accomplish with technological advancement. 
  • Talk to the stakeholders: It’s important to ensure all the objectives in the IT roadmap align with what key stakeholders need. It’s probably wise to gather all these stakeholders together for a meeting, in-person or virtual, and show them a first draft of the technology roadmap, or at least a list of the strategic objectives you and your team wish to accomplish.
  • Prioritize initiatives: At this point in the technology roadmap creation process, you should have a good idea of the overall strategic goals you want to achieve. But what’s the best way to get there? In what order should you and various team members complete tasks? Which technology initiatives take precedence? This is the stage to decide all that. Prioritize your initiatives based on categories such as urgency, feasibility, impact, and resource requirement. Also, it’s wise to use this time to sequence the technology initiatives logically, considering how different projects may affect or depend on one another.
  • Develop realistic timelines: Timelines are crucial for project management and getting tasks completed in an orderly fashion. It’s difficult to imagine successful strategic planning without timelines for its staff and projects. However, if there’s one thing worse than no timeline, it’s an unrealistic timeline. It’s crucial to take the steps to establish a realistic estimate of the time and resources required to fulfill each initiative. A helpful timeline is one with clearly delineated milestones, an appropriate budget, a list of potential risks, and contingency plans in case something goes awry.
  • Allocate resources: Having a budget is great, but that only means you know the maximum you can spend to achieve an objective. How and where do you spend the money, labor, and technology to accomplish your strategic plan? Your tech roadmap strategy should have clear instructions for allocating company resources. You can always shift responsibility among departments or team members later on as needed, but at this stage in the strategic roadmap process, you should establish how you expect to use resources to support each initiative.
  • Monitor progress: You can’t just put the technology roadmap in place and come back at the end to see if it worked. As part of project management, it’s critical to monitor progress as teams complete technology initiatives. Establish metrics and KPIs to monitor and track progress so you know if you’re on schedule to succeed. 

 

Achieve Your Strategic IT Goals

Technology is supposed to help you meet your business objectives, but sometimes it all seems more confusing than helpful. Greystone can help. We’re a premium technology provider and can get you the effective IT solutions you need.

We’ll help you achieve a successful implementation of your IT roadmap, complete a digital transformation, and reach your IT and cybersecurity goals. Contact us today to find out how we can help you accomplish your technology initiatives and strategic goals.

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Keeping up with technology and IT trends can be a pain if it is not one of your passions. That’s where our digital community comes in! Sign up to receive helpful news and tips about technology trends, IT, and digital transformation.

Digital community

Keeping up with technology and IT trends can be a pain if it is not one of your passions. That’s where our digital community comes in! Sign up to receive helpful news and tips about technology trends, IT, and digital transformation.