How to Build a Technology Roadmap Steps and Examples

The work that IT does supports the teams that serve external customers. So the goals for your IT department should align with broader company goals as well. The work that you include on your technology roadmap should ultimately deliver value to the business. IT teams are responsible for the architecture, applications, and technology that bring real value to both internal and external customers. Your work is critical to helping the organization increase efficiency and achieve its goals.

Although many companies forecast market trends, they can only adapt to changes through proper preparation. With a detailed technology roadmap, IT employees know exactly how, where, and when to implement technologies. Without this plan, businesses are more likely to make costly mistakes, elongate operation downtime, and rely on guesswork. A technology roadmap is a document that summarizes how a business should implement new technology during IT projects.

What goes in an IT roadmap?

These dates help everyone understand long-term goals, and keep track of whether tech adoption is successful, post-implementation. From a practical point of view, the roadmap should also outline what kinds of tools are best to spend money on, and the most effective way to introduce new systems and processes. While this form of a roadmap is more detail-oriented than the previous two examples, it still serves to provide an overview. The roadmap will allow development team members to share what precisely they’re working toward. Applications play an essential role in the modern-day business workflow.

• Minimizing costs of pricey tech projects could be considered a ‘big fire’ for your team.
• For example, if a risk factor of a company using a new app is the unfamiliarity employees have with it, the IT team can plan to create an instructional presentation and user guide.
• These drivers are the critical variables that select the technology alternatives.
• Those executives might not understand any of the terms you use in conversation to discuss this project with your IT coworkers.
• This assessment will give you the perspective you need to make smart choices about how to respond when things don’t go as planned.
• If IT managers aren’t careful, these problems can snowball into irreconcilable damages.
• In fact, your technology/IT roadmap should always account for training time, as training includes the guidance needed for internal teams to adopt and support a new system.

Since professionals use roadmaps to guide their work, this planning tool ensures quality communication for the team. Although your technology roadmap is regularly subjected to changes and new strategies, these new changes should not come to the detriment of the organization’s plans. Design your technological roadmap to provide the necessary means to meet both the short-term and long-term technological goals of the organization while also managing internal technological projects. As your business develops, your business processes and requirements will also grow and evolve. From workflow to resource management to emerging technologies and others, they are quick to adapt to changes in their industries and the needs of their target audience. If you’re more focused on the categorization of individual tasks than specific timelines, the Chart View is certain to come in very handy.

How to create an IT roadmap

IT roadmaps are similar to internal IT system roadmaps, as both types explain how an organization plans on assembling and maintaining internal technology solutions. Changing a company’s technology could also affect its security and compromise private data, so it is important to make a thorough https://globalcloudteam.com/. Roadmaps also help to simplify technological plans in a way that professionals who do not have any IT expertise can understand. Software architecture major in building a solid foundation that serves as the organization’s biggest backer. You can effectively carry this out with the architecture technology roadmap which comprises key components such as application programming interface , user interface, and storage integrations. An IT roadmap can act as an efficient tool to plan out strategic technology innovations of the future.

VITA facilitates development and provides oversight to ensure IT resources are used and appropriately managed within enterprise projects and procurements in support of agency business objectives. Just as there are many different kinds of IT processes, there are also various forms of technology roadmaps. Therefore, businesses should review various technology roadmap examples to determine which best suits their needs. Several teams and stakeholders are usually involved in technology roadmapping, from IT to general, product, and project managers; to operations, engineering, finance, sales and marketing, and legal. Professionals include several deadlines in a technology roadmap, as they plan to make the technological advancements in increments. This allows the company a smoother adjustment period between changes.

Many businesses conduct user interviews to improve the UI and overall digital experience. By creating a roadmap with the previous components, companies can what is an IT roadmap successfully integrate systems to create a universal interface. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes.

With the right roadmap app, of course, you can add relevant stats, charts, or links to data beneath each item; keeping that information hidden from view until you’re ready to present it. You’ll keep your roadmap presentation clean and free of clutter, but still be able to pull up evidence immediately if someone challenges you or asks for supporting data. When you decide to change corporate email systems or some other aspect of your IT environment, you will need to earn the support of affected stakeholders across the company. Lucidchart is the intelligent diagramming application that empowers teams to clarify complexity, align their insights, and build the future—faster. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more. At this point the technology drivers and their targets are specified and the technology alternatives that can satisfy those targets should be specified.

Risk factors

In this phase the key decision makers must identify that they have a problem and that technology roadmapping can help them in solving the problem. ERA works with government, industry, investors and innovators to develop the TRM and ensure it accounts for uncertainty in factors such as the pace of technology development and global decarbonization. The key to a successful technology roadmap is its ability to quickly and effectively communicate the strategic plan to the right constituents. If you’re balancing a whole slew of applications and need to get nitty-gritty about the “when” and “why,” a Timeline View of your application roadmap is most effective. Mapping out how your application portfolio will be upgraded and maintained over time, this view of an application roadmap is a simple way to update stakeholders on when new tools or upgrades are required. With an app for almost every part of a business workflow, it can get overwhelming to remember what to sign into, when and why .

You can create roadmaps in a variety of ways, but it’s essential to consider the mediums you wish to use for the roadmap. For example, you can consider making paper copies or using a specific planning computer program. While software provides employees with the opportunities to access the roadmap easily, a physical copy can be important for employees who cannot understand the new technology easily. While companies and professionals use these roadmaps as a planning and management technique, roadmaps are also useful for presentations.

How to Run a Collaborative Roadmapping Exercise with Your Team

Using these roadmaps helps companies efficiently manage their application portfolios, make better software choices, and control the implementation of new apps. Below is a typical timeline view, where all plans are laid out on a schedule, so you and your team can focus on the when. Miro’s whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share them. Get started by selecting the Technology Roadmap Template, then take the following steps to make one of your own.

Once you know who you need to go to for input, start speaking to them. Seriously, just grill them and find out what you should be including on the roadmap, what makes sense to them in terms of formatting and so on. Your next key step is defining which stakeholders will just see the roadmap and those who should be involved in the technology roadmapping process. Think of it as a melding of your business and IT strategies; relaying to the rest of the organization how your IT strategy aligns with your business goals. For example, a SaaS company that wants to convert 30% of their free customer base to paid this year might require a marketing automation system so that marketing can nurture and upsell free users. On top of that, sales and CS might need a new, more powerful CRM system to keep up with the influx of new customers and keep them happy.

Roadmaps can serve many different purposes and be organized in a variety of ways. To spark your inspiration, read on to see the three example ways we’ve created technology roadmaps. Basically, if you’re finding there are a bunch of infrastructure-related projects you want to put on your product roadmap that don’t fit anywhere, it’s usually time to implement a roadmap. It should be a plan that demonstrates how your technology initiatives support your product initiatives. The development roadmap is probably the most in-the-weeds technology roadmap example, as this is the roadmap based only on your dev team’s work.

If the company implements a change without thinking through the implications, it could create problems for the business’s operations. And even if the company addresses these risks, the change itself could be disruptive. Status reports are necessary to keep all relevant stakeholders abreast and informed of the progress of the new technology adoption.

Why a technology roadmap is important

Develop your digital transformation strategy to better prepare your company for the future. Increase productivity by implementing technology that serves your immediate needs. In table 2 all the different sub-activities of the development phase can be seen. As part of engaging in more active management of our portfolio, ERA has developed a Technology Roadmap to help guide investment decisions and inform our portfolio mix.

Example of a technology roadmap

Committed leadership is needed because of the time and effort involved in creating a technology roadmap. Additionally the leadership should come from one of the participants, one of them provides leadership and sponsorship. This means that the line organization must drive the process and use the roadmap to make resource allocation decisions. It is easy for large enterprises to lose sight of all the important initiatives going on across their IT organizations. An enterprise IT roadmap allows you to visualize your strategic initiatives. The audience of internal stakeholders will be looking to the IT team for delivering internal-facing systems, security, and other solutions.

You should have some data supporting your plans and goals somewhere in the roadmap. Now that you’ve decided on your primary strategic goals, it’s time to turn those goals into a plan. Making any change to a business’s technology environment can be a complicated task. The companies that fare best through these changes are the ones who forecast their industry’s evolution and make thorough plans accordingly. Planning for these changes can be a challenge—but with the right data, research, and most importantly, a clear roadmap, a company can not only survive downturns but thrive through them. They’re too engrossed in high-level strategy to know the minutiae of your IT infrastructure.

You’ll have to make a strong case, so try to avoid using overly complicated structures and too much data. The quicker your stakeholders can grasp the benefits of your plan, the better your chances of getting a green light. I’ll run you through them, then share our proven steps for building a good roadmap.

A technology roadmap illustrates the technology presently available and emphasizes scheduled improvements. A technology roadmap should also consider which technologies will become obsolete or are scheduled for end of life. For example, a technology roadmap will show when the previous system will sunset and when the new one will be implemented. In this step the critical system requirements from the second step are transformed into technology drivers for the specific technology area.

With this roadmap, planning ahead and prioritization of IT projects becomes more feasible and scrambling to put out IT-incited fires becomes less of a reality. The visual nature and systems-orientation of roadmapping helps to address the complex and interdependent nature of technology development. Roadmaps support communication within technical teams, with commercial functions, and with external customers, suppliers, and other partners such as university research groups.