Strategic Ways to Build Your Technology Roadmap
A digital transformation is a well-planned journey and to successfully navigate it, an organization needs to devise a digital roadmap. A digital roadmap is utilized to define, manage and launch digital touch points. This sophisticated project plan details durations and dependencies of all the initiatives within the digital strategy. It also provides checkpoints for assessing the progress and success of each initiative in the future. Customers are demanding new experiences, partners want greater access and employees want additional convenience and a digital transformation helps to facilitate this. So, embrace the challenge of digital disruption and continue to create value with the help if a strategic roadmap.
According to study conducted by Forrester, only 27% of businesses have a coherent digital strategy for creating customer value in place.
Ensure that your business stays relevant and thrives in this competitive landscape with a well thought out roadmap.
A digital transformation is all about business outcomes. The most effective roadmaps are those that are aligned with business strategy from both the top down, blending overall goals the latest technology trends. Building a great digital roadmap is understanding how to maximize reusability of these components and services.
Starting to navigate your Digital Transformation
Each organization is unique with its own culture and goals and because of this, each business must create a roadmap unique to its needs. When developing a digital roadmap, it is important to ensure that achievable, realistic and major milestones associated with each project throughout the journey.
Digital roadmap and strategy should focus on yielding tangible results for an organization, these may include:
- Maximizing return on investment of products and services
- Amplifying efficiency
- Reducing costs
- Enriching customer and employee experiences
- Developing a proactive cyber security strategy
- Creating a more nimble enterprise
- Respond to evolving customer preferences
As an organization begins to create their roadmap, many questions must be considered, these include:
- Where do we want to get to with our digital channels?
- What are the major milestones between where we are now and where we want to be?
- What is each initiative going to cost?
- Where are the barriers and dependencies?
- How do we measure ROI?
- What does success look like?
It is important to remember to focus on outcomes not just specific technologies. This is because technologies are changing at rapid pace and an organization’s roadmap must evolve with them.
When developing a digital roadmap, businesses should take into account 7 pieces of strategy. These being business goals, business initiatives, features and fixes, user stories, components and services:
- Business goals: Measurable achievements that a roadmap will help to accomplish
- Business initiatives: Specific projects that are leveraged to achieve business goals
- Features and fixes: Outputs from the digital delivery team used by the project teams driving business initiatives.
- User stories: Pieces of work that convey individual user journeys or workflows, bundled in a way that is convenient for software engineers to build
- Components: Software modules that create an intuitive user interface or application programming interface to fulfill user stories
- Services: Data flows blended together to feed the components described above with the information they need to fulfill their functions
Investing wisely in the Digital Transformation
Many organizations are eager to invest in the newest, shiniest technology, however the latest technology doesn’t meant that a business is now prepared to remain competitive, grow and thrive. It has to be the right technology. For a roadmap to be successful, it is important to understand that the technology used will change and evolve with the needs of your organization and customers. For your roadmap to be functional it must be:
- Responsive: The ability to modify tactics in response to what is being learned through research and measurement throughout your organizations journey.
- Aligned: An organization’s roadmap is working in tandem with and support of a businesses overall strategy.
- Human centered: Prioritizing and measuring initiatives that is aimed at specifically impacting specific customer behaviors.
- Democratized: Ensure that a roadmap is visible and available across all teams to ensure transparency and welcome contributions from team members.
A digital roadmap is all about embracing new capabilities, not necessarily new projects. From major data systems to data analytics plans and implementation, there are many components to consider when creating a technology roadmap. In order to effectively ensure that your company meets its organizational goals, invest in the assistance of professionals to help plan your roadmap and lead your business to the future. The team of experts at VALiNTRY are here to help your organization successfully navigate and choose the right digital infrastructure, people and processes to invest in.
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