Why and How to Create and Use Technology Roadmaps

The proper scope, purpose, content and visual representation of technology roadmaps depends on the target audience. Across the board, however, four best practices help ensure you create and use tech roadmaps effectively to support business models and drive goals.

Tech roadmaps target different domains and decisions and take many visual forms, including:

• Emerging technology roadmaps track the evolution and potential impact of emerging technologies that might be relevant to the organization. They help IT leaders prepare for implementation by laying down the right digital foundations. They also enable tech producers to integrate innovations into their portfolios at the right speed and scale. 

• Technology life cycle management roadmaps track current and planned changes to applications and infrastructure so architecture owners can decide where to optimize and rationalize the technology portfolio. 

• Technology implementation roadmaps help plan for implementing new technologies. They provide IT and relevant business-function stakeholders with an overview of current and planned projects and help them to manage any interdependencies.

• Enterprise technology strategy, which itself evolves with enterprise business strategy, should drive tech roadmaps. Each business outcome has explicit and corresponding technology outcomes. For example, technology to speed customer-service response times feeds customer-satisfaction and experience goals.

• Capture this alignment in clear and concise IT strategic plans that document the initiatives and enabling technologies and capabilities needed to drive business outcomes — and feed these into tech roadmapping.

• Develop a plan for your future- or target-state technology architecture, inclusive of the technologies the organization must modernize or invest in over the next few years in order to realize its business outcomes. Also identify new capabilities that the business needs and existing capabilities that require better technology. 

• Enterprise architects and business leaders are key stakeholders alongside IT leaders in creating current- and future-state business capability maps. Poor collaboration could lead to a bottom-up technology approach in which the architecture fails to support future business capabilities and needs.

• Technology roadmaps should look different and contain different details and information depending on the technology-related decisions the stakeholder needs to make.

• Creating several types of roadmaps is an important best practice, because it avoids the need for a single enterprise technology roadmap, which gets overly complex.

• Limit the amount of information included in the roadmap and the attributes it displays to the information that stakeholders deem necessary for their decision making. 

• Commit to regular updates, especially if an event occurs that requires a shift in strategy or business and technology risk profiles. Even in stable business conditions, the fast pace of technology change means you should review tech roadmaps regularly (more than once a year).