Digital transformation and, not least, the COVID-19 pandemic have caused the complexity of IT systems to increase rapidly. Companies, and in particular their IT departments, must constantly readjust to changing conditions, processes and technologies.
A service roadmap supports the development of your IT systems with precision. We explain why you should have such a roadmap for each of your existing or newly implemented IT services, and how you can derive a project portfolio for your organisation from individual roadmaps.
Components of a service roadmap
A service roadmap is a visual representation of the further development of an IT service and its service components.
A service is broken down into its components such as hardware, operating system, applications, end devices, etc. Each service component is planned based on its lifecycle and the individual steps are distributed along a timeline. In particular, the following should be taken into account:
- Hardware warranty periods
- End of support and end of life for operating systems
- New application releases
- Development of user numbers (for the expansion of the backend infrastructure)
- Future service levels
Benefits of a service roadmap
The importance and complexity of IT systems is increasing at an enormous rate. IT departments are therefore often no longer able to make decisions alone or treat individual requests as one-off events. The strategic importance of the IT landscape requires that management is involved in plans and a coherent concept for the future is developed.
A service roadmap brings many business and strategic benefits:
- Alignment of IT services with business strategy: a service roadmap creates transparency about the further development of all IT services, enabling them to be aligned with business strategy.
- Simplification of planning processes: by decomposing IT services into their components, individual projects can be planned, efforts calculated and resources deployed in a targeted manner.
- Improved investment planning: a service roadmap makes it possible to derive necessary investments and integrate them more precisely into the budget planning process.
Building a service roadmap in six steps
1. Identification of all IT services: first, the IT service portfolio is identified. A separate roadmap is created for each service based on steps 2–6.
2. Decomposition of IT services: the individual components are identified: backend hardware, server operating systems, applications, databases and end devices, as well as services such as the service desk and ITSM processes.
3. Definition of development steps: for each service component, the planned update/upgrade dates are placed on a timeline. Critical questions: when does the warranty expire? When will there be no more security patches? When are new releases coming?
4. Effort and cost estimation: internal efforts, external efforts and investment costs are identified.
5. Prioritisation: based on efforts and costs, the initiatives are prioritised and resources are adjusted according to the overall budget.
6. Planning of initiatives (projects): the individual initiatives are planned in detail before implementation begins.
It is important to anchor regular review cycles to take changing conditions into account.
Conclusion: The service roadmap as a driver of IT strategy
A service roadmap not only serves to identify costly misguided investments at an early stage. It provides substantial support in defining and visualising the strategy, thus stimulating the discussion needed to establish a unified direction and shared vision for the company.