Benefits of a service roadmap

The importance and complexity of IT systems are increasing at a tremendous rate. They are responsible for enabling a company to deliver its core services, scale effectively and manage its costs. As a result, IT departments can often no longer make decisions on their own or treat individual requests as one-offs. The strategic importance of the IT landscape demands that senior management be involved in plans and that a coherent approach to the future be developed.

A service roadmap is an important part of such a future picture and brings many business as well as strategic benefits:

Alignment of IT services with business strategy: A service roadmap creates transparency about the further development of all IT services and thus enables them to be aligned with the business strategy.

Simplification of the planning processes: By decomposing IT services into their constituent parts and planning their respective lifecycles, individual projects and programs can be planned, expenses calculated and resources deployed in a targeted manner.

Improved investment planning: A service roadmap makes it possible to derive necessary investments for the further development of an IT service. This enables them to be integrated more precisely into the organization's budget planning and individual projects or programs to be prioritized on the basis of the business strategy.

Creating a service roadmap in six steps

1. Identification of all IT services: The first step is to identify the IT service portfolio (i.e., all IT services available to the business). A separate service roadmap is created for each of these services using steps 2-6.

2. Decomposition of IT services: The next step is to identify the individual components (service components) that are needed to provide the IT service. This includes, among other things, back-end hardware, server operating systems, applications, databases and end devices. Services such as the service desk and IT service management processes should also be considered.

3. Definition of the development steps: For each service component, the planned update/upgrade dates are put on a timeline (with individual intervals, e.g., on an annual or quarterly basis). In addition, the roadmap should also answer critical questions such as:

When does the warranty or support for my hardware expire?
As of when are there no more updates or security patches for the operating systems?
When are new releases of my application coming out?
Which of these resleases do I want to provide to my organization?
When do I need to increase the memory of my backend infrastructure?
When do I have to upgrade my end devices (e.g. notebooks) to the new versions?

To facilitate prioritization of the individual activities, a distinction is made between those further developments that must be carried out (e.g., because support is expiring) and those that are "nice to have" (e.g., because new features could be provided). As part of this step, a first version of the service roadmap is created.

4. Effort & cost estimate: For the further development of IT services and their service components, the internal efforts and the resources required for this, external efforts (e.g., for external consulting), and investment costs (e.g., new hardware and software) must now be identified.

5. Prioritization: Based on the efforts and costs for the individual projects, we can calculate the costs and efforts across all IT services based on the defined time intervals. In a bottom-up approach, these costs can be taken into account when planning the budget. In a top-down approach, the individual projects are prioritized and the resources available for them are adjusted according to the overall budget. This is where the previous categorization of must-have and nice-to-have comes in handy.

6. Planning of the projects: In the final step, the individual plans or projects are planned in detail in order to implement the service roadmap.

It is important to anchor regular review cycles of the service roadmap in order to be able to take changing framework conditions (e.g. technologies) into account accordingly.

Conclusion: The service roadmap as a driver for IT strategy

Creating solutions for companies - that is the declared goal of IT services. At the same time, they run the risk of making costly misinvestments if there is no clear communication and a coordinated strategy. A service roadmap not only serves to uncover precisely such misinvestments at an early stage and align them with the company's goals and requirements. It provides essential support in defining and visualizing the strategy and thus stimulates the discussion needed to establish a unified thrust and common vision for the company.