There are many
aspects that we need to address when creating IT roadmaps such as better
business support, replacing old and not supported
technologies/products/applications, strengthening ( new servers, storage,
licenses, databases, etc' to support IT in the next 3/5 years) and more. In this
post I'll try to focus on planning IT for better business support.
In order to do
this task we need to collect data about enterprise business capabilities (will
be addressed with examples in my next post), applications, products, databases
and technologies as well as the relations between them. Relations should
describe which applications and products support business capabilities as well
as databases and technologies (including
server and storage) that support applications/products.
Stage 1 : Business
capabilities and what we are missing from business point of view
We start with
modeling of business capabilities and existing application and products. Then
when we have all capabilities, applications and products we ask our business
user to define which application / product they are using for each capability
and what is the percentage which they believe that the IT asset help them to do
the work. When this work is done, we have a list of application/products
attached to each capability that the users believe it has an IT support. If the
users believe that IT fully support a given capability the sum of all the
supporting assets percentage will be 100 percent (each IT asset might have
different percentage reflecting different weight / satisfaction as seen by
users).
Using this data we
creating a heat-map view of business capabilities. The heat-map depicts in red,
yellow and green if a capability has none, partly or full IT support. This view
give us an impression where there are areas in the business that doesn't have
any IT support or are not fully supported by IT. This view is also created in an
excel report, which shows for each capability, supported IT assets and the
percentage of each one of the supporting IT assets.
Having this data
we can start to realize what are the business areas that we need to cover in
order to better support the business. First we are looking for capabilities that
has many unsupported instances in the map. Creating IT solutions for those
capabilities will generate more impact from IT point of view. Following the
mention above capabilities we order unsupported capabilities on the basis of
core and context capabilities.
Step 2 : IT assets
and what can be done from IT point of view to provide better support
Having a list of
all (the supporting business capabilities) applications and products we start to
map what are the databases, technologies, servers, data storage etc' that those
applications are using. This data also include ( as properties) what is the cost
of each one of the IT assets, how old is the technology, when support is going
to be expired, etc'.
We are using this
data for three main purposes:
- Finding out if we
can use current assets to support gap in business support: for each gap in the
business capability heat-map (partial support or not supported) we try to
identify if an existing IT assets might provide support and what will be the
cost of this support. We add this data as another dimension to the list of
business capabilities with gap in IT support (the list that was mentioned in
step 2 ), so mow we know the cost of each proposed solution using existing
assets.
- Find old technology
or product that could cause problems and harm business capabilities that already
have support. A capability might have perfect support from the user point of
view, but from IT point of view the capability might experience issues due to
the fact that the IT solution is based on old or unsupported technology/product.
To ensure better IT support to the business we want to handle such scenarios and
to replace the old/unsupported technology/product. The output of this work
stream is a list of technologies/product that needed to be replace in the next
3/5 years as well as the impact of those changes on other IT assets.
- What are the impact
of new technologies, applications and products. For each gap in capability
support that doesn't have any solution by using current IT assets we try to
identify new technologies / products or new home developed applications that
could help IT to fill the gap. For each one of the new proposed IT assets we
indentify costs, dependencies and impact on current and new IT assets. We are
using the described information to add it as another dimension for each (not
fully supported) capability, similar as described in the first purpose.
Step 3 : creating
the roadmap
In the end of
phase 2 we have a list of proposed solutions for filling gaps in capabilities
support and to prevent issues in capability operation. Now we need to take in
account existing projects, any type of dependencies and resources (budget, human) to create a
roadmap. In this step we try to come up with a road map that will have maximum
effect, support of core capabilities and will be able to execute from resources
and dependencies point of view.