Why having a Technology Roadmap will help pave the road for your business

Are you a corporate business in need to hit the quarterly revenue quotas and be cost-efficient? Or are you a startup having to ensure maximum profitability of your investments? Be it implementing a feature your competitors have, and you don’t, or ensuring your business’s scalability, a technology roadmap will guarantee that your investments and efforts align with your long-term goals

Benefits of having a technology roadmap

There are several essential advantages of drafting a technology roadmap, and they fit for any business, large and small.

Becoming and staying competitive

Every market is competitive, and competing by price tag alone doesn’t work anywhere outside of grocery stores. Most outstanding businesses offer unique features or customer experience based on technology their competitors don’t provide. The roadmap helps highlight the time and resources needed to implement the latest technology and stay ahead of the market.

Uber is a great example. It disrupted the transportation market by allowing any driver to earn extra cash and any passenger to get to their destination in a luxury car instead of a cab. This result was achieved by launching a user-friendly mobile app, while the rest of the market offered only a callback option. Now, almost every taxi service has a mobile app, but Uber has already made a considerable profit.

Ability to predict IT expenses

A roadmap shows the approximate timeline for rolling out new features, processes, and tools, and, therefore, can highlight upcoming expenses. Of course, the hardware can still unexpectedly fail and cost you in operational spending and data value, unless you have replication in place and planned for contingency and failover. However, while unplanned expenses can happen, knowing when to expect predictable investments helps plan the IT budget better.

Smooth transition to the cloud

If your business is cloud-native, a question “to cloud or not to cloud” should not bother you. But if you’re still using mainframe systems or dedicated servers, as most companies do, cloud migration is a hot thing. Still, the transition to the cloud can render your business infrastructure inoperable if planned and executed poorly. Technology roadmap helps note and keep track of multiple steps for your cloud journey to succeed.

Regulatory & compliance fit

Roadmaps help prepare for any regulatory and compliance changes your company must undergo.

Ability to attract better IT talent faster

Having a structured plan of IT systems evolution helps predict the need for new talent. This way, your HR and talent acquisition department can start looking for the right candidates long before they are needed. And you can get the best fits, not just someone to put out a fire that has been burning for half a year already. Speaking of which…

Putting out the fires

To continually remind of the problem your department faces and to show how it affects the rest of the organization is a whole different beast. The technology roadmap helps highlight the crucial challenges for every company and dedicate sufficient resources to solve them timely. By the way, about the appropriate solution…

Using employee time efficiently

The roadmap underscores mid- and long-term business objectives and draws your employees’ attention to it. Instead of doing routine tasks that can be automated, which is the roadmap’s most urgent priority, it’ll free up employee’s time to achieve goals that matter.

Improved relations between all business parts

Many companies consider their IT departments processual bottlenecks and money wasters. At the same time, they should be the drivers of tech innovation to make the business more productive. Technology roadmap helps align the business goals and IT initiatives to improve interdepartmental communication, show how and when the needs will be addressed, explain why some tasks take so much time. Spoiler alert: it’s most likely not due to IT being pricks, it’s because they need to do something else first to fulfill your request.

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