BUSINESS ALIGNED TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY ROADMAP

A strategic digital roadmap is a documented set of artifacts that memorializes all the action items needed in order to help an organization accomplish its mission in the world. A strategic roadmap details all the steps needed in order to achieve a specific destination.

We see every strategy as a two-part process. First, we must define the destination you seek from the impact of the improvements technology can make. Second is a detailed list of the improvements in order to reach that destination. One without the other is ineffective because a roadmap without a clearly stated set of targets will miss the mark. A destination without a roadmap to define the steps to get there is a pipe dream.

FPOV has an excellent track record of helping clients define the destination they seek and then working backwards to develop the strategic roadmap that can be followed by team members and vendors. We also are very good at communicating all along the way, so your team learns how to do this on their own so they may do so in the future, long after the engagement has ended.

A roadmap is not a collection of upgrades to software and systems. In too many cases, leaders accept a list of upgrades as a strategy document. This does nothing but drive an organization into wasting money and time with their IT budgets. It also makes no sense to have technologists develop a strategy in a vacuum without input from the business side of the operation.

As digital tools and processes continue to grow more critical as facilitators of progress for the whole entity, the need for a VERY well thought out strategy is increasing. As technology gets more expensive to purchase and build, there is more of a risk of wasting resources because the strategy is flawed or not well thought out in the first place. The money you spend developing a top-notch strategy roadmap comes back to you fivefold in avoiding wasted resources and maximizing the support of your team members to achieve their efforts.

FPOV has been designing digital strategies for organizations for many years. This experience (which encompasses organizations across many different sizes, industries, and constituents has taught us invaluable lessons as to what results in a powerful strategy that can be acted upon. We bring these past experiences to each new client we work with.

THE DIGITAL STRATEGY ROADMAP DESIGN PROCESS

The process for developing your digital strategy has value outside of the final deliverables. All along the way, FPOV will be helping your team learn new concepts and models they will be able to apply to improve your Digital Maturity. This is an important distinction for you to understand about this project. The actual process of defining your digital strategy will help move the organization forward in meaningful ways. The following bullet points describe the basic tasks we perform in order to develop your roadmap and destination.

  • Document Review is where we start. This helps us get up to speed on areas such as the enterprise architecture you’ve already built, past planning strategies, and the current state of your digital governance. There is a lot for us to learn about the current state of your digital world, and also how well you document. To the extent you do not have documents to support what you have or have done, we learn this is an area we will need to fill in for you.
  • Discovery Interviews will be conducted at your location. FPOV consultants will interview members of your team from across the organization. In addition, FPOV will conduct brainstorming meetings with stakeholders. These interviews and meetings will help us to identify and collect all of the information we need to build the blueprints and strategy roadmap.
  • Destination Development is the next step. We will take what we learned from the interviews, document reviews, and create a draft set of destination measurements. These will help us agree on the results we expect at the end of the timeframe of the strategy roadmap. These are examples of destination measurements:
    • Competitive ranking (if appropriate)
    • Enterprise architecture performance levels broking into systems of record and systems of engagement
    • Team members’ digital capabilities
    • HUMALOGY® Balance (levels of automation)
    • Financial performance

Once this is agreed on, we can complete the next step.

  • Strategy Roadmap Development is the process of creating the various lanes of a digital strategy and filling in the timing of the important action items. For example, we always want to see actions in the following categories (as a minimum):
    • Software upgrades
    • Hardware and network upgrades
    • Training
    • Skill additions
    • Digital governance
    • Automation
    • Security improvements
    • Compliance and regulatory needs

We develop the first draft of a roadmap that reflects all we have learned from the interviews and also our advice as to what it will take to achieve the destination. Once the draft of the roadmap is done, we send it to you for edits or additions until we have a roadmap and destination that are in perfect sync and reasonable to achieve.

  • Document Artifact Delivery – As work is completed, we will turn documents over to you. In many cases, there may be more than just a destination and roadmap document. There may be optional documents you chose to do along the way (e.g. data and application blueprints) or process documents that we agree to provide to help you with specific action items on your roadmap.
  • Digital Strategy Delivery – We have found that it is critical to “deliver” the roadmap to various audiences, so we work with you to define the constituents who need to gain knowledge of the strategy plan. This could include your board of directors, all team members, partners, customers, donors, etc. This roadmap will be delivered either in-person or via teleconference.

DIGITAL STRATEGY ROADMAP OPTIONS AND OVERLAYS

There are a number of optional overlays or workshops we can provide to enhance the core digital strategy process. In each case, the option provides a deeper dive into a specific area, or an additional angle on the strategy that may only be needed by a subset of our clients.

  • High Beam Workshop – This one-day workshop focuses on defining your market five years out into the future. We use a number of techniques with your team to create clarity as to what your future market will look like and the investments you will need to make along the way to be productive in the future. You can learn more about our High Beam Process here.
  • Application and Data Blueprints – This is an area of consulting where we help you develop your own visual language for documenting the technology platforms and data structures you have built. This is critical to do if you have not created visual diagrams of your technology state as of yet. If it is not visualized, it is difficult to talk about it strategically or envision what it will look like in the future.
  • Digital Maturity Assessment – FPOV has an online tool for creating scorecards that measure your digital maturity level in nine different dimensions. These include areas such as Leadership Digital Readiness, Technology Team Skill Levels, Data Intelligence, Systems of Record performance levels and Systems of Engagement performance levels. The scorecards from these assessments paint a clear picture of the improvements that need to be made to help you get to the next level. You can learn more about our Digital Maturity Assessment here.
  • The Budget Overlay – We take a completed digital roadmap and do the financial analytics to estimate costs, resources needed, and the potential ROI from completing the roadmap successfully.
  • The Incentives Overlay – In order to assure the roadmap is completed on time and on budget, we create a system of incentives that help align the behavior of the technologists and vendors involved to give the best chance of success
  • The Competitive/Peer Overlay – We research organizations you feel are competitors or peers and show how you will compare to them from a digital standpoint. We have a model for comparing that we use to collaborate with you on who you want to compare to and in what areas.

DIGITAL STRATEGY ROADMAP DESIGN DELIVERABLES

The following is a bullet point list of areas of value you will take away from a strategic digital roadmap project:

  1. FPOV advisory services regarding how to apply technology to achieve your goals
  2. FPOV input on the design of your enterprise architecture
  3. A review of your digital policies and procedures
  4. A gap analysis on the digital skills needed to accomplish the strategy roadmap
  5. A PowerPoint presentation that memorializes the overall strategy roadmap (including the destination)
  6. Executive overview versions of the PowerPoint presentation, where needed
  7. A Word document providing insights that we gained during the interviews. These insights are generally related to your level of digital maturity and where you might have gaps that need to be improved that are NOT covered in the strategy roadmap
  8. A new set of KPIs for measuring the technology progress you make
  9. Technology Guideposts: Three to five specific areas of technology capability your roadmap will provide to help you advance in the market. You can learn more about technology guideposts here.
  10. Access to our document library where we have helpful content on improving specific areas called out in your roadmap
  11. FPOV help with delivering the strategy to your constituent audiences