December 19, 2017
Like most things in life, it’s important to have a plan for your IT environment. Yet, the technology industry poses a particular challenge. The industry innovates at such a rapid speed, your IT director always needs to be looking ahead to improve the environment and keep the business competitive. The best way to keep this ongoing effort organized is with a detailed technology roadmap. In our technology roadmap infographic, we hope to show simply how it works.
A technology roadmap essentially charts the path from the current state of your environment towards a well-defined goal, but before you start drafting your roadmap, you need a game plan. The technology roadmap infographic highlights the steps to planning your strategy.
Drafting Your Technology Roadmap
As you can see in the technology roadmap infographic, theroadmap creation process is crucial to the overall success of the roadmap. In theory, your plan should be detailed enough and thought-out enough to help your business reach their goals without complications. The last thing you want is to run up against budgeting issues or a lack of in-house skills halfway through your roadmap.
With that in mind, we recommend following this six step process when drafting your roadmap. The steps are arranged in a way to help you efficiently create the roadmap and account for common roadblocks and variables.
Read our technology roadmap infographic below to prepare your game plan for the year to come.
Knowing Your Plan and Knowing Your Players
In keeping with the football theme of the infographic, one of the most important parts of crafting a gameplan for a football team is understanding your players. The final step in our roadmapping game plan asks that you assign personnel to each task in your roadmap. The type of skills you have in-house will dictate what kind of projects you can undertake, and what, if any, third party support your business will need to employ.
When faced with a skills deficit, football teams go out recruiting, and you should too. Hiring specialized, experienced IT professionals can be a significant challenge for many small to medium sized businesses. Learn why in our blog post, “4 Reasons Your IT Recruitment Is Struggling.”
If IT recruitment initiatives are struggling, many businesses turn to a reliable managed services provider. For less than the cost of a full-time IT employee, you can enter into a managed services agreement which provides monitoring and support for your environment from highly-certified and experienced professionals.
Learn more about managed services and how it can address the challenges of small businesses in our infographic, “Curing Small Business Pain Points with Managed Services.”
Download Our Free Guide:
The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Technology Roadmap
These six steps may provide a solid outline on how to draft your technology roadmap, but there is much more to learn. Download Mindsight’s Ultimate Guide to Creating a Technology Roadmap to see the whole picture. This free guide will give you expert advice on how to maintain lines of communication between IT and business executives, the value of drafting a technology roadmap, and how to avoid common pitfalls in the roadmapping process.
The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Technology Roadmap is your essential launching point for your own technology roadmap. Download the guide today.
Like what you read?
About Mindsight
Mindsight, a Chicago IT services provider, is an extension of your team. Our culture is built on transparency and trust, and our team is made up of extraordinary people – the kinds of people you would hire. We have one of the largest expert-level engineering teams delivering the full spectrum of IT services and solutions, from cloud to infrastructure, collaboration to contact center. Our highly-certified engineers and process-oriented excellence have certainly been key to our success. But what really sets us apart is our straightforward and honest approach to every conversation, whether it is for an emerging business or global enterprise. Our customers rely on our thought leadership, responsiveness, and dedication to solving their toughest technology challenges.
Contact us at GoMindsight.com.
Meet Mindsight’s Security Solutions Architect (And Ethical Hacker), Mishaal Khan