Team standing around table with post-it notes coming up with a design roadmap

Who needs a stinkin’ roadmap?

The emphasis on technology and cloud migration continues to expand, and if organizations are not careful, operational results will be negatively impacted. These trends give rise to an increasing focus on capacity, bandwidth, and security, to name a few. For operational teams to improve their chances for success and to prevent getting lost along the way, using a roadmap approach can be a very valuable strategy.  It should be considered as a foundational part of the process.

Approaching a technology solution fixated on driving change can lead to many unintended outcomes:

  • Forcing business processes to change to fit technology that may be sub-optimal for operational success
  • Contributing to a long list of business challenges, such as conflicting or inaccurate data, multiple sources for data of record, poor visibility across related platforms, limited decision support, and difficulty in scaling system
  • Not supporting desired future state for key systems and applications

Technology solutions developed and implemented in these situations do not support the operational readiness of the teams and have the potential to doom your projects to failure.

Successful development of tools and platforms must be predicated on enabling key business processes through technology. Follow these key four steps to plan your journey properly.

  1. Develop an understanding of the key business processes and how they interact.
  2. Understand your resources’ skills  and how technology could best support their efforts in the key business processes.
  3. Embrace an IT vision and strategy for the organization, including architectural and implementation models.
  4. Prioritize the solutions around the business processes and use a disciplined yet flexible approach to meeting the operational needs of the business.

The ideal roadmap will align the business across multiple processes and teams. Planning for capacity, bandwidth, and security can be approached methodically. To improve your chances for operational success and avoid those oft-repeated stories of road trips gone awry, it is critical to have clear communication across the organization, emphasizing the organization’s objectives, expectations, process, and status.

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