bai 604 chapter 6
Seven Important Activities
1. Guiding Principles 2. Current Technology 3. Gap Analysis 4. Technology Landscape 5. Future Technology 6. Migration Strategy 7. Governance
What Is A Technology Roadmap?
A technology roadmap is the collective vision of the opportunities for technology to serve a business. A technology roadmap is a mechanism for the identification, justification, planned evolution, and orchestration of technology to enhance business performance.
External Benefits of a Technology Roadmap
Achieves business goals by identifying the gap between the business plan and the current technological environment. Reduces complexity by reducing the number and variety of technological choices. Enhances interoperability of business functionality across lines of business. Increases flexibility Increases speed of implementation through common standards, methodologies and technology platforms. Preserves investments in new and existing systems by basing them on long-term considerations. Responds to market changes by building from an established framework. Focuses IT investment dollars Simplifies the response to new legislation Reduces difficulties associated with deployment of new technologies by utilizing fewer technologies, common platforms, and similar development approaches Provides a common design point that facilitates end-to-end integration of reusable components and applications. Builds a consistent and cohesive technology base that can create a critical mass of skills dedicated to select technologies. Provides the ability to move forward in planned phases by providing an orderly evolution of each technology through a life cycle approach Consolidates global solutions by synchronizing local technologies into the global roadmap Lowers the cost of development and maintenance by increasing reusability of components
Deploy Component-based Applications
Adhere to component-based and layered architectures with standardized generic interfaces. Engineer application quality by conforming to logical architecture specifications. Allow end users to establish and change business rules.
Utilize Industry Standards
Adhere to industry accepted-standards and methodologies. Adopt flexible data interface standards. Adhere to corporate technology and development standards to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and timeliness of applications development.
Roadmap Consultant Recommendations
Be bold and innovative when planning the roadmap. Align technology with the business. Secure support for the roadmap. Don't forget the people. Control, measure, and communicate progress.
Governance
Define an established process to determine who is responsible for creating/updating the technology roadmap and who approves changes to the roadmap. Distinguish between strategic architecture governance and tactical architecture governance.
Future Technology
Describe the technologies to be adopted in the future. The roadmap should include the logic that was used to recommend these technologies to permit constructive input from business managers to challenge these recommendations. The roadmap should include all assumptions.
Process-Centric Architecture
Develop strategic systems in-house. Maintain critical technologies skills base. Utilize strategic partnerships to bring in leading-edge technology skills and transfer that knowledge to your staff.
Guiding Principles
Establish a statement of the role and purpose of technology within the business. Define how technology supports the business. Define the overall type of technology support to be delivered with a sense of performance.
Technology Landscape
Firms must invest in R & D to keep abreast of new technologies. The size of this investment should be driven by how critical IT is to the business. The roadmap should articulate how large this investment will be, how it will be enacted, who is responsible, and provide guidelines to assist this initiative.
Migration Strategy Principles
Migrate from production-centric to process-centric applications architecture using service-based architecture. Deploy component-based applications to minimize costs. Utilize components based on industry standards. Utilize middleware to minimize application changes.
Migration Strategy
Outline a Migration Strategy to get from the current technology to the future technology platform. Two common strategies are the gradual evolution and the big-bang. A major challenge is to assign priorities to technology components that need to be changed.
Current Technology
Outline the current technologies and their state. At a minimum indentify the business process area, vendor, level of support, dependencies, criticality, and life cycle. Assign a technology owner who is responsible for each technology domain including acquisition, maintenance, vendor relationship management, training, and documentation.
Gap Analysis
Perform a gap analysis between the current technology and what is needed. Identify the required technology. Build technology in anticipation of business change and growth. Bridge the gap between business being driven by innovation and growth and IT benefits being derived from standards and reusability.
The Challenges in Building a Technology Roadmap
The target architecture continuously evolves, so the technology roadmap must be an ongoing process. Technology has many masters, such as vendors, standards-setting boards, and trading partners. Unexpected roadblocks may occur.
Utilize Middleware
Utilize middleware to integrate application services across and within business domains. Utilize metadata to define and document application interfaces. Include both application interface services and workflow integration services. Increase the degree of information and workflow integration across customer and vendor-facing processes.
Why Do We Need a Technology Roadmap?
Without it companies run the risk of making sub-optimal technology decisions. "Plans are nothing, planning is everything". The planning process tells an organization what they did where, where they failed, and how to improve. A technology roadmap limits the range of technology decisions.
