Why You Need a Strategic IT Roadmap

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Why You Need a Strategic IT Roadmap

The IT roadmap takes on enhanced importance for the technology leader as they move from operator to strategist. Here is why you need one and why your functional counterparts should be supportive.

By Steve Ronan as written on www.cio.com

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I have come across several companies recently who do not yet have an IT roadmap.
In each situation the technology leader has said they want to be more strategic: they have visions of tech that pushes the business strategy forward and they have heard great stories about cloud/mobile/digital/social/etc. Unfortunately, they work in a cycle of reaction that manages to short-term needs rather than strategic priorities and many cannot find a way out.
Enterprise software is a victim of this cycle. Since it’s complex and pervasive it requires constant feeding by the IT department. Because it’s used to support fundamental business functions users frequently request new functionality. This makes it difficult to adopt the newest, most exciting technologies available because the immediate priorities are always fixing what exists.
CIOs themselves recognize this. Steven Norton (@steven_norton) at the Wall Street Journal (@CIOJournal) summarized the Top 5 priorities for CIOs this year. Two of the five are directly related to strategic vision (the other three are all related to security and risk).
The question becomes: “how?” The answer often lies in a new roadmap. A technology roadmap can help the CIO act more in line with the strategy of the organization. It benefits both technology leaders and functional leaders and encourages collaboration that results in true executive alignment on existing and new investments.
What is a technology roadmap?

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A roadmap is the governing document that dictates specifically how technology will support the business strategy and help drive businesses priorities over the next 3-5 years. From what I have seen, the best roadmaps contain the following:
  1. A strategy statement with the list of the strategic priorities for the business (not IT-specific).
  2. A timeline of the initiatives and projects that will occur over the next several years with approximate start and end dates, durations, and sizes.
  3. A prioritized list of improvement opportunities. This is generated jointly by the business and IT and should be refreshed periodically.
  4. High-level justifications for each project. These should be robust for projects over the next 12 months and simpler statements for projects past the 12 month horizon.
  5. The estimated cost and duration for each project. This is specific and reasonably accurate for projects occurring over the next 12 months and can be vaguer for projects that go out farther than that.
  6. An owner for each project. This is the sponsoring executive or delegate directly overseeing the project. For projects in the next 12 months it should be the specific person and for projects beyond that it can be the owning executive.
To support the roadmap (but keep separately), I recommend technology departments keep up-to-date versions of:
How will you use it?
The roadmap has three primary functions:
  1. The IT leader will use it to facilitate investment discussions with the rest of leadership. The IT leader will use the roadmap as a baseline when discussing new projects or priorities with functional executives. It will help leadership understand how to balance investment and project priorities and provide a way to visualize tradeoffs.
  2. The IT department will use it to improve planning for projects and resources. The roadmap will help them anticipate resourcing needs, plan assignments, software and vendor selection, and costs ahead of time, and make it possible to start visioning and planning with the functional owners well in advance.
  3. Functional leaders will use it to understand what is required of and will be delivered to their departments. It helps them clearly understand how they should balance existing roadmap initiatives with new requests. The roadmap will keep functional leaders aligned on strategic technology priorities across the enterprise. Active management of the roadmap will result in much better executive alignment and stakeholder buy-in before projects even begin.
Who benefits from it?
Technology Leadership
The roadmap is designed to structure the communication between the technology department and the functional executives in a manner that allows the IT department to:
Functional Leadership
The roadmap allows functional executives to be strategic when they request new or improved technology. They can use their functional strategies to begin working with IT leadership to determine which types of technology projects will be required to achieve their goals.
The roadmap provides transparent resourcing needs for when business staff will need to be assigned to IT projects, clear traceability to costs, and the detail for why those resources and dollars are required.
Most importantly, it provides a strategic, structured manner of governing changes to business needs as they arise. It makes sure there is a technology voice at the table when decisions are made that require IT support, and it encourages balancing priorities across the business, diffusing conflict before it arises.
Staff and Project Teams
The roadmap clearly spells out why the projects they are working on are important and, as things on the roadmap move or are re-prioritized, it forces the leaders to explain why and how those priorities are shifting. The roadmap encourages a clear and regular line of communication between leadership and staff.
The Bottom Line
The business needs to fully participate in the development process. In fact, if the CIO reports to anyone other than the CEO, I recommend the sponsoring executive sit outside of IT. Because of the strategic nature of the document and how critical leadership buy-in will be, it will need support at the highest levels of the enterprise.
If you are a technology leader: you need to push the executives to support the development of an IT roadmap to help you invest strategically and have structured conversations around investment with the other executives.
If you are not a technology executive: you should be pushing your organization to develop a roadmap so you can act more strategically in your area and benefit the business holistically with new investments.

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The votes are in: Azure is the public cloud of choice

 

A survey found Azure has opened up a sizable lead.

By Andy Patrizio as written on www.computerworld.com

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A new survey of IT professionals shows Microsoft Azure has overtaken Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the public cloud provider of choice, although there is considerable overlap.
The survey was commissioned by Sumo Logic, a data analytics provider, and was performed by UBM Research. It surveyed 230 IT professionals from companies with 500 or more employees.
The survey found 80 percent of enterprises currently use or plan to use at least one public cloud provider, if not more. And given the figures, a large number are clearly using more than one. Around two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said they use Azure while 55 percent said they use AWS. Salesforce App cloud comes in third at 28 percent, IBM fourth at 23 percent and Google is at 20 percent.
More than half of the Azure users were from enterprises with more than 10,000 employees, which suggests that Microsoft’s cloud is particularly popular with large enterprises, according to the survey.
The result is notable because this is the first survey to put Azure ahead of AWS. All other past surveys have always found AWS to be the leader in the public cloud provider market. Now 230 IT pros does not a major trend make, but it could be the first sign that Microsoft has taken the lead in this market. Or it could be an aberration.
Additionally, the survey found that 67 percent of those surveyed are using software-as-a-service (SaaS), about four out of 10 are using infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and/or platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Also growing in popularity is DevOps, the new means of application development, which goes hand-in-hand with cloud use. UBM found 68 percent of those surveyed either plan to adopt DevOps or already have.
DevOps is meant to be a faster means of writing and deploying new applications, and that goes with the findings of the survey that 42 percent of respondents said they are deploying apps more frequently than in the past, while only 8 percent of respondents said they were deploying apps less frequently than in previous years.
“Trends such as cloud computing and DevOps are helping companies become more flexible and responsive to market conditions. However, as cloud computing becomes standard in IT organizations, concerns about security persist,” said Amy Doherty, research director for UBM Technology in a statement.
Security remains the top concern of companies embracing the cloud. When asked about the biggest challenges related the cloud, security received the most votes (27 percent) from respondents. While the majority of those surveyed (55 percent) said public cloud services are more secure than they used to be, only 6 percent describe the security of public cloud as “excellent.”
Other sore spots for cloud adopters are migrating applications and data to the cloud (15 percent), obtaining a unified view of cloud and traditional IT infrastructure (8 percent) and managing cloud-based apps and operations (7 percent).