Enterprise Technology Roadmap represents the exercise focused on charting the course for your company’s future.

Like any exercise that involves dealing with long term planning decisions, technology roadmap or IT roadmap is a complex problem. By definition, any decision covering long time horizon is fraught with uncertainty leading to complexity and ambiguity.

The main reason for complexity lies in the conflicting goals of the main players (CFO, Business and IT) involved a shown below:

The solution lies in getting to a stage where CFO sees the priority and ROI from the IT program being pushed by business, and IT is able to deliver the products or services without ‘gold plating’. This requires working with all the main stakeholders and detailed investment analysis and planning is required for adding any IT initiative to the roadmap.

Application Rationalization is usually an integral part of the roadmapping exercise. It allows stakeholders to analyse the application landscape in view of current and future needs. It may involve following:

• Adding new applications to the IT landscape
• Enhancing the existing application to provide new features
• Maintaining existing applications with no change
• Replace existing application with new one
• Retire the existing application without any replacement
• Re-platforming the application on cloud

Further, in view of businesses pushing for digitalization, building of digital platform is gaining momentum as a precursor to building portfolio of digital applications and other IT assets. Building digital platform is not a easy task and requires long term commitment for investment and cultural change that are needed to enable digital business. This is the next topic of our discussion.

Author’s Note: I will continue to add more thoughts on digital journey to my blog. in the meantime, let me know of your feedback or comments.