Coffee Notes: IT Roadmaps

What are roadmaps and why are they important? You hear it all the time, Vendor Roadmap, Technology Roadmap, Application Roadmap, Portfolio Roadmap.

In short a road map is just what it sounds like. It’s a definition of what’s ahead, and it’s really important. Every other part of a business plans for the future, IT has historically been reactive, waiting for feature requests, waiting for issues to fix etc. Oh and before you flame me, by waiting I’m not suggesting sitting around twiddling your thumbs, I’m an IT guy and I know that’s not the case, what I mean is that we’re all too busy trying to fix the issues that came in at 3am to think about tomorrow.

Say I have an application running on Websphere and I know the next version of websphere is due out in a year, what is my plan for the app, when should I migrate it, is there a new version of Oracle coming out 4 months later, maybe I should wait.

Creating roadmaps for each technology in your suite helps map how the progression of each change effects the entire stream.

The IT field is not a maintenance free realm. Planing the progression of your technologies now will save you tons down the road.