Why Your Company Should Have a Technology Roadmap
In today’s digitized world, technology is everything. And to allow everyone in your business to do what they do best, you need a technology roadmap. But why should your company have a technology roadmap, and what is it?
What is a technology roadmap?
A technology roadmap, or IT roadmap, is a document outlining the plan for how your business will use technology to reach your short and long-term goals.
A comprehensive technology roadmap should include:
Decision-Making: allows you to manage and give timely access to data and information to make better decisions across your organization.
Collaboration: focuses on enabling users to interact with each other and relevant data anytime, anywhere, and on any device. This is especially important post-pandemic.
Productivity: The saying goes ‘Time is Money’, and this is especially true in business. Old, unsupported and underperforming technology wastes time and costs the organization in lost opportunities. Technology standards support productivity by enabling efficient troubleshooting, management, and predictable performance of IT infrastructures.
Compliance: is foundational to compliance standards in other functional areas of your business.
Continuity: is more than data backup. It refers to the ability to keep your business running in the event of disasters and to reduce costly downtime.
Security: complex cybersecurity threats can happen to companies of any size. Managing these threats requires continuous monitoring, defense, and a coordinated approach to reducing the risk of data compromise.
Efficiency: The foundation of efficiency is process, and process makes sure that the right resource are completing the right things at the right time. Technology enables efficiency by automating process.
Who should be involved in a technology roadmap?
Since technology includes your entire company, you should involve people from a wide range of areas and departments. Create your planning committee with at least one person from sales and marketing, legal, finance, operations, general management, product and project management, and other people from areas you deem necessary.
To avoid misunderstandings or future arguments, make sure the people you involve are decision-makers or have some authority in your company.
So why should your company have a technology roadmap? Let’s explore five reasons you should consider.
1. To understand the current status of the company in terms of technology
A technology roadmap allows you to understand where your company is in terms of its technology. With a clear picture of your IT infrastructure, you can map out how they align with your business goals, allowing you to make better investments and decisions.
It also allows you to assess your IT staff’s skill level and capabilities and spot any weaknesses in your infrastructure.
2. To plan technology developments
With a technology roadmap in place, you can map out and keep track of all technological developments within your business, allowing you to be proactive and see how the developments impact the way your company operates.
When planning technology developments, you also get a better understanding of the costs and durations for all your developmental projects. And by keeping tabs on your innovation, you can better respond to market demands and opportunities.
3. To serve as a day-to-day project management guide
A technology roadmap can serve as the ultimate guide for project management. It will show you from a project management perspective how you can make the best use of your developmental resources while also giving you a better understanding of how to execute your plans.
With this guide in hand, you can make sure you’re moving towards your overarching organizational goals — and know the moment you steer away from them.
4. To remove unnecessary costs and increase productivity
It’s very common for organizations to use more tech than they need. By mapping out what technology you have and actually need, you can save costs by removing the applications that don’t support your business goals.
And by focusing on the technology you need, you can increase your productivity by investing in the technology that works for you and your unique business needs.
5. To create a predictable IT budget
Investing in unnecessary tech is indeed unnecessary. A technology roadmap gives you the insights you need to make accurate investments based on your needs and goals. With an overview of your technology, your IT budget becomes predictable and effective — with room to adapt as you go.
Budgeting is hard. And the cost of tech is high. You have an excellent financial foundation for everything surrounding IT by reducing unnecessary costs and knowing that your budget goes to the right things.
A roadmap to better decisions
You have now learned about the importance of a technology roadmap and why you should have one. A technology roadmap can do many great things for your business. Not only does it give you an understanding of where your company is in terms of technology, it also allows you to streamline costs, increase productivity, and much more.
A technology roadmap is a great way towards becoming more strategic and making more data-driven decisions. As a CFO or COO, the roadmap serves you incredibly well since it will help you both streamline costs and operations.
Need some help to create your technology roadmap? Reach out to us and we will gladly help!