CIOs for the most part have had to ditch multiyear roadmaps, knowing that the rapid pace of change makes it near impossible to plan just three years out — let alone five years in the future, as once was the standard.
Even with many CIOs now going with 18- or 24-month roadmaps, a lot of unknowns remain.
“Roadmaps are just a plan, where we’re taking an educated guess of what the future might bring. And humans have shown through history that we’re very bad at guessing the future,” says Jenica McHugh, managing director of Accenture’s technology strategy and advisory practice.
In other words, no matter how much thought goes into a roadmap, stuff comes up.
“There are always gotchas. That’s just life,” McHugh says.
Given that detours and delays are inevitable, McHugh says the real test of skillful leadership is how the CIO redirects IT’s plans when the unexpected happens.
“It’s how you deal with the gotchas that matters. You should be forward-looking, asking, ‘How do we adjust? What do we need to do to accommodate the gotcha to still achieve the outcome we want?’” she says.
Here, McHugh and other IT leaders and advisors share common IT roadmap issues and how CIOs can deal with them.
1. You followed the roadmap — to no-man’s land
A good portion of CIOs still build roadmaps based on specific technology projects their business colleagues want done and will fund, says Bobby Cameron, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. In fact, research shows close to half of all CIOs have this type of roadmap, he says.
Roadmaps built around projects focus primarily on fulfilling user requirements, Cameron explains. They’re not focused on supporting strategic goals or achieving a specific outcome.
“The roadmap is really set by someone other than the CIO, and so the CIO really doesn’t know what good looks like and doesn’t know what the desired outcome really is,” Cameron says.
In such cases, IT will follow the roadmap exactly, delivering all the technology components specified by the business, but still not land where the organization needs to be.
CIOs who don’t want to end up in no-man’s land need to become strategic partners with the business so that together they can identify the desired outcome, Cameron says. That allows the CIO to devise the best path to get where the organization wants to go.
Cameron has seen this shift in action at a financial firm, where an executive asked IT for a system that would produce a list of bad corporate loans. Instead of putting the project on the IT roadmap, IT observed the executive at work to understand his needs. The team learned that the executive wanted the list so that he could then manually get data on each one and then prioritize which needed attention. Knowing that, IT put a more advanced solution on its roadmap and delivered a system that enabled the exec to generate the list as well as access and query data — which was the real outcome sought, although not initially requested.
2. You don’t have the buy-in you thought you had
Experienced execs know they need buy-in from stakeholders if they want to successfully transform. As such, good IT roadmaps have plans for change management and stakeholder management.
But even when those components are executed according to plan, CIOs may find that some stakeholders aren’t truly sold on the outcomes IT is trying to reach or how IT is going to get there, says Raul Pena, CIO of VLS Environmental Solutions.
Pena speaks from experience.
Pena puts a high value on the people aspect, explaining that he starts with getting user buy-in and executive sponsorship and works to bring stakeholders on the journey as IT-enabled initiatives move forward.
“We value employee opinions and we value their input. But the bigger you are as an organization, the harder it is to get everyone in the room and get that buy-in,” he says.
In one case, IT was implementing a new system throughout the organization to replace a collection of systems used in different divisions — a legacy of growth through mergers and acquisitions.
“We had alignment with the leadership team and at the midlevel and we thought at the local level,” he explains. “But we started to hear from people at the local level that they didn’t want to use our system unless we replicated everything in their [existing] system.”
Looking back, he says leadership had communicated the vision and thought workers in the local offices embraced the objective. IT learned that wasn’t the case, a lesson that threatened to stall plans as outlined on the roadmap.
“We learned that assuming the message was received and accepted is the wrong approach,” Pena says. “You need to get down into it more. And the way to do that is not by pushing the big picture but by showing up in person, by listening to [users], hearing what they need and showing how the new system will help them and will address their needs.”
3. You don’t have the data necessary to succeed
As organizations seek to enable more data-driven decisions and use artificial intelligence to drive efficiencies or grow revenue, a high percentage of initiatives on IT roadmaps will require data to succeed.
Yet too often progress on those initiatives comes to an unexpected stop because of data-related problems, says Cory Chaplin, leader of the technology and experience practice at West Monroe, a digital services firm.
“We see progress stop all the time because they don’t have the right data or they don’t have quality data,” he says. “Today almost everything is data-driven, but so many people stumble into issues with their data. And when that happens, it really hurts your outcomes and your timeline.”
Chaplin says these data issues come up not because CIOs and other enterprise leaders aren’t cognizant of the data needs but because of the complexity of getting data needs right, especially with AI projects.
“There are a lot of assumptions that needed data is pretty good,” he says. “But the depth of data and the number of disparate systems and the transparency of what’s in those systems, what is in every field and how constrained it is, they’re unknowns.”
And it’s those unknowns that can halt or derail teams as they execute the IT roadmap.
Chaplin says he works to vanquish those unknowns by doing deep dives into the data as the IT roadmap is being built, so he can determine whether the roadmap needs to include work to address data issues and what resources that work will take.
“The roadmap should include what you need to do to fix the data,” he says.
4. The people you need aren’t available when you need them
Accenture’s McHugh has seen work roll along according to timelines laid out on IT roadmaps until the work requires involvement from a new resource — an executive or subject matter expert — who isn’t available when needed.
“There are a limited number of SMEs in any organization, and their time is limited, and those limits around SMEs can be a gotcha. It’s a common one,” she says.
CIOs should anticipate such issues and take steps to mitigate them, McHugh says.
She recommends using the IT roadmap as a “communication device,” so that stakeholders and key contributors know about the work to be done and the timeline for it.
And it should be a planning tool, she says, so CIOs can take steps — such as training additional workers to be SMEs or lining up outside resources — to ensure people with the needed knowledge will be available when it’s required.
McHugh also advises CIOs to use agile principals to help them pivot — rather than halt work — if a particular stakeholder isn’t available, saying CIOs should revisit the IT roadmap every 90 days and treat it as a living document that they can adjust.
“You can achieve a goal in different ways,” she adds.
5. An unanticipated disruption leaves you at a fork, unsure which way to go
Even the most careful planner can’t anticipate everything — particularly events that come out of seemingly nowhere. Yet such events happen, and they can put IT way off course from its original roadmap almost instantaneously.
A cyberattack, for example, will redirect everyone in an organization — and certainly in IT — to containing and recovering from the attack. “Nothing happens on any platform during that remediation, which can take three, four, six or more months,” Chaplin says.
Sudden changes in the economy that result in spending freezes or drastic budget cuts, a new technology that is a significantly better enabler of the organization’s objectives, or a new CEO taking the company in a different direction all throw wrenches into the IT roadmap.
Like McHugh, Chaplin says CIOs must be agile and pivot when such circumstances arise.
“You’re at a fork. You need to evaluate and decide whether to tweak, modify, or shift,” Chaplin says.
But Chaplin also advises CIOs to better predict the possibility of such events by speaking with vendors and analysts to understand product roadmaps, studying business and economic trends, and working with executive colleagues to see what they’re seeing on the horizon. That work, he notes, will help limit gotchas from circumstances outside IT’s control.
Read More from This Article: 5 IT roadmap gotchas in a disruptive era
Source: News