All IT leaders have been there. Every new year, you’re tasked with developing an IT strategy and technology roadmap for the upcoming year. You need to figure out your priorities, allocate resources wisely, justify your current spending, reduce complexity and lay down the focus areas of your IT function for the next 12 months.
Add to that the pressure of keeping up with emerging technologies such as AI, reducing wasted spending and anticipating future technical needs while sticking to your budget.
This is easier said than done.
So, how can you strategically assess the current state of your IT and develop a roadmap for future growth this year?
In this article, we’ll provide you with a step-by-step plan for developing an IT roadmap that we use for our customers and a playbook that you may want to steal for your organisation. Let’s get started!
Key stages of developing your IT roadmap
For many companies, IT strategy is reactive.
Maybe your leadership decides it’s time to cut costs, and now your team is scrambling to identify savings.
Or you’re affected by a security incident and need a plan to bolster defences.
The downside of such an approach is that it ends up being a tick-box exercise where you patch issues without a comprehensive look at what’s really needed. Instead of a reactive approach, we’ll guide you through a proactive framework broken down into four key stages.
1. Align IT strategy with business goals
Business strategy drives your technology strategy, not the other way around. However, more often than we think, organisations jump the gun into planning without looking at their business goals. Before you do anything else, take a step back and ask what your business is really trying to achieve.
Some questions to ponder include:
- What are your top 5 business and technology challenges?
- What are your top 5 business objectives, and how can IT help you achieve them?
- What are you trying to achieve in the next 12 months?
- What’s a drain on your team’s productivity?
- Are there any specific regulatory or industry challenges on the horizon?
For example, your business may be expanding, opening new offices in other regions, or growing through acquisitions. Perhaps you’re in a cost-cutting phase and need IT to streamline operations and identify savings. Talk to key decision makers within your business and understand your ‘WHY’.
Plotting out your IT roadmap doesn’t mean finding new technologies to invest in without a solid reason or business case. This will not deliver results in the long term or support your existing processes. Your IT roadmap should be focused on how technology will enable your organisation to achieve its business goals.
After this, it’s time to take stock of what you have today.
2. Audit everything (Yes, everything)
Once you identify your ‘WHY’, it’s time to look at “WHAT”.
What does your current IT setup look like? This step is all about auditing your systems and processes and capturing detailed insights so you can make informed decisions.
It may not always be clear where to start or what to look for, but breaking things down by IT pillars can make this process manageable. Here’s how you can dive into each area and the common questions to ask along the way. How easy you find this step depends on how well you document your current processes and systems.
- How much do you spend on each area today?
- What’s the ROI from those investments?
- Are your systems optimised to meet current and future business needs?
- What are the risks to Business As Usual?
After this, get specific about each pillar. This should be an exhaustive exercise covering your service desk, servers, cloud, endpoints, networking, Microsoft 365, security, compliance, communication and contact centre systems, disaster recovery and business continuity.
For example, for your cloud services, look at the following.
- Are you paying for capacity that you don’t need?
- Can you save by committing to longer durations or fixed workloads?
- Were applications simply lifted and shifted to the cloud? Can they be refactored for better performance and cost efficiency?
- Do you have an effective uptime monitoring and cost management system?
Do the same for other pillars.
Clevr360: Finally giving you the visibility you need
To do this audit, you need to have full visibility of your current systems. If you’re using disparate tools, you’ll have a huge task ahead of you to bring it all together in one place.
53% of IT teams report difficulties achieving complete visibility into their technology investments. To plan an IT roadmap, you need to clearly see what you have today. This is where a tool like Clevr360 can help.
Clevr360 brings a unified view of your technology estate from multiple disparate tools such as Microsoft 365, RingCentral, Avaya, Mitel and others in one place.
It provides a comprehensive view of your IT estate, enabling cost savings, enhanced productivity, and improved compliance. Our experts use Clevr360 to audit systems efficiently and build informed IT roadmaps for our customers.
3. Highlight the gaps/risks and develop an action plan
Next up? It’s time to pinpoint the gaps and risks you need to address for each service area. We recommend starting with a RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status for each area, as shown below, highlighting the number of issues against each. This helps you quickly flag which areas are urgent, which need attention soon, and which are in good shape.
With this info – and the business goals you set in Step 1 – you can start building an action plan that addresses the highest-priority risks and gaps. But not everything can be done simultaneously. No one has the budget or time to do that without disrupting daily operations.
Instead, we recommend plotting your projects on an Impact vs. Urgency Matrix. This helps you figure out which tasks should take top priority and which can wait. Focus on the projects that offer the biggest impact and the most immediate need while pushing less critical items to a later date.
4. Review, optimise and improve
An IT roadmap is a living, breathing document that needs to be reviewed and optimised regularly.
Sure, it doesn’t dramatically change every year, but regularly revisiting and refining your plan is essential to staying on track and prepared for the unexpected.
For example, new security risks or compliance updates might demand a change in the focus of your roadmap. Your business priorities may change, or new advancements may come out in the market that demand a relook.
Even if nothing changes, it’s a good way to monitor how you’re performing against achieving your business objectives and staying aligned with your goals. It’s also a good opportunity to fine-tune your plan, adjust timelines, reallocate budgets, or refocus efforts where needed.
Ready to plot your IT roadmap for 2025?
Check out our Clevr360 tool for a single view of your IT estate before that. And remember, you don’t have to do it all yourself. We do this for our customers every year at no additional cost, and we’d be happy to support you, too. Get in touch with us to discuss more.
