It Roadmaps Explained with Examples

This article takes a look at a few of the different types of roadmaps and provides some samples that you can leverage in your own strategic planning initiatives.

What is an IT roadmap?

Before we can start talking about roadmaps, we need to understand what one is. An IT roadmap is a strategic tool that can help graphically illustrate both long-term and short-term plans. In short, it says where you are and where you plan on going within the next few years. There are several different types of roadmaps depending on what area you want to chart a course for.

Let’s take a look at:

• Service roadmaps
• Infrastructure hardware roadmaps
• Strategy roadmaps
• Technology roadmaps

Service Roadmap

The service roadmap is focused on the IT Services that you provide the organization. These can be especially useful when explaining what services you plan on retiring or spinning up over the next few years. The service roadmap contains a list of all your services. It allows you show at a glance:

• The services you are spinning up
• The services you are maintaining
• Which services are in preparation for retirement
• The services that will replace any services that may be scheduled for retirement

Let’s look at some great examples of service roadmaps.

University of Michigan

One excellent example is from University of Michigan. They have developed a concept called a Michigan Enterprise Strategic Assessment (MESA). This is one of the few examples I have seen that breaks the traditional graphical “Gantt style” representation of a roadmap. They instead plot services on a curve that provides a lot of information at a quick glance.

Take a look at the U-M example.

University of South Carolina

Another great service roadmap example comes from the University of South Carolina, University Technology Services. They take a different approach in presenting their roadmap. This example shows three main areas of investment as well as what efforts they have deferred. It also provides a great example of what technologies they are retiring, and which ones will be taking their place (if any).

This example is great for CIOs to get a perspective on all of the systems they are responsible for. View the USC example.