Whatever happened to the three-year IT roadmap?

Like many execs, Erica Hausheer has had plenty of experience using three-year roadmaps to guide projects and conversations about planned work.

“It was one of my tools in my toolkit,” she says.

But the value of long-term roadmaps has dwindled to the point where Hausheer, senior vice president and CIO of Teradata, now uses a different, shorter-term plan to steer her and her team.

“We identify what specific things we’re going to do at a program level and how we’re going to go after those in a 12- to 18-month plan, and that plan needs to have some flexibility built in,” she explains. “It’s more about our annual portfolio. And beyond [that timeframe], it’s more at a strategy level, knowing that what and how I’ll deliver is going to change.”

For decades, organizations and their executive teams looked years ahead. They crafted five-year business plans and three-year roadmaps to provide their organizations with not only a destination to reach but the directions to get there.

CIOs used that approach, too, developing three-year roadmaps to keep their IT departments on track.

But the rapid pace of tech advancements and disruptive market shifts has prompted some CIOs, such as Hausheer, to abandon the practice. They say it’s not worth mapping out a three-year plan when a transformative new technology could emerge seemingly overnight. And, like Hausheer, they’re finding that a reworked, and oftentimes shorter, roadmap is the way to steer their department forward.

“I don’t think the three-year roadmap is dead, but I do think it’s different,” says Marc Tanowitz, managing partner for the advisory and transformation practice at digital services firm West Monroe. “For years, the roadmap was incredibly detailed, with plans for build and run activities, all this functionality that was going to be laid out over time. But now it has taken on a different feel.”

A new focus on the short-term

Bob Grazioli, CIO of Ivanti, is another IT leader who has ditched the three-year timeframe.

“IT roadmaps are now shorter, typically not exceeding two years, due to the rapid pace of technological change,” he says. “This allows for more flexibility and adaptability in IT planning.”

Kellie Romack, chief digital information officer of ServiceNow, is also shortening her horizon to align with the two- or three-year timeframe that is the norm for her company. Doing so keeps her focused on supporting the company’s overall future strategy but with enough flexibility to adjust along the journey.

“That timeframe is a sweet spot that allows us to set a ‘dream big’ strategy with room to be agile, so we can deliver and push the limits of what’s possible,” she says. “The pace of technological change today is faster than it’s ever been, and if IT leaders aren’t looking around the corner now, it’s possible they’ll fall behind and never catch up.”

She continues: “Some changes — like implementing gen AI — are fast to value. That’s where we need to implement, iterate, and improve quickly, while working toward our long-term strategies. Other changes can take more time, especially if they involve complex cross-functional work, significant investment, or upskilling.”

Bobby Cameron, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says the length of IT roadmaps vary. Some IT organizations benefit from longer outlooks while others benefit from shorter ones depending on various factors, such as the pace of change in their industries, their organization’s objectives, and the projects and systems encompassed by a particular roadmap.

But Cameron says research has found that the highest-performing IT organizations, which Forrester defines as transformational ones, have abandoned the three-year roadmap in favor of ones that are two years or less. And they’re refreshing their roadmaps at least quarterly to incorporate changes in the technology and business landscapes.

And, Cameron notes, research shows that IT departments that have roadmaps that stretch out three years or longer generally aren’t as responsive or supportive of their organizations. They enable the business to operate but they’re not ensuring the organization outpaces the competition, let alone transform.

“The folks who are telling me that they’re working on a three- to five-year strategy are telling me that their business strategy doesn’t have a lot of change going on,” he adds.

Roadmaps still matter

To be clear, executive advisers and seasoned CIOs say there’s still a need to set a course for IT — whether it’s called a roadmap or something else, or whether it’s a year out or more. Even as such plans have become shorter in duration, they are still valuable, says Jenica McHugh, a managing director in Accenture’s technology strategy and advisory practice.

“A roadmap is still a useful tool to provide that north star, the objectives and the goals you’re trying to achieve, and some sense of how you’ll get to those goals,” McHugh says.

Without that, McHugh says CIOs won’t consistently deliver what’s needed when it’s needed for their organizations, nor will they get IT to an optimal advanced state.

“If you don’t have a goal or an outcome, you’re going to go somewhere, we can promise you that, but you’re not going to end up in a specific location,” she adds.

Roadmaps also help CIOs manage the various stakeholders — their executive colleagues, board members, workers — by setting expectations on what work will get done when. And they help CIOs know they’re moving in the right direction at the right pace by establishing milestones that they can use to mark progress.

“They help create conversations, too, and help everyone know what to work on and what work to prioritize and what work doesn’t serve the goal [stated on the roadmap],” McHugh says.

McHugh has worked with IT departments that don’t have any roadmaps and describes them as “very reactive.”

“It’s like Whac-A-Mole, and they’re constantly behind because they don’t know the direction they’re supposed to be going,” she says.

McHugh works with CIOs to set their roadmaps, tying them to their organization’s overall strategy. For these roadmaps, McHugh sticks with the three-year timeline. However, she drastically varies the particulars included year to year.

The roadmaps have detailed plans for the first year, including monthly activities, milestones, and additional notes nestled underneath both of those, for months coming up. But detail begins to fade out past 90 days, and the second and third years have only general high-level plans.

The problem with multiyear roadmaps, McHugh says, isn’t so much looking ahead, rather it’s having too much specificity. “The error tends to be too much detail in roadmaps,” she explains. “Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. So if you’re doing too much detail, it’s false precision.”

Given that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that McHugh advises CIOs to become increasingly sparse on their visions as they look two to three years ahead. Roadmaps generally should go no further than that, she says, because it’s impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy that far in the future. “Once you get past year three, we’re nearing the point of making things up,” she says.

Additionally, McHugh says she advises CIOs to adjust roadmaps regularly, calling for them to revisit their roadmaps every 30 days to assess and then adjust as needed the plans for the upcoming 90 days.

“What’s important is making sure your roadmap is built in such a way that it’s flexible to change,” she adds.

Business focus is key

The flexibility of a roadmap as well as its length are only two of the factors to consider when crafting an IT roadmap, McHugh and others say.

A roadmap’s alignment to the organization’s overall strategy is as critical — if not more so — than the roadmap’s duration or flexibility.

“Sometimes IT has created a roadmap in a vacuum. It’s not even that the roadmap is wrong, but IT can be in a spot where it’s difficult to explain how IT’s plans align to what the business wants to achieve,” McHugh says.

If that’s the case, CIOs “have to go back to the roadmap and talk about business goals and milestones and how to tie the IT roadmap to the business strategy,” she says.

Ivanti’s Grazioli says he and other CIOs increasingly have been taking that approach.

“The multiyear IT roadmap is still happening, but it has shifted from being technology-driven to being more business-driven,” he says. “This change is because CIOs need to align with the entire C-suite and have visibility with the CEO to ensure that IT plans and investments align with overall business goals.”

He adds: “A good IT roadmap will also incorporate business needs into IT priorities, focusing on business-driven outcomes rather than IT asset-driven improvements only.”

Romack, too, stresses the importance of aligning the IT roadmap to business, saying she works the business goals into the roadmap timeline from three angles.

First is visionary planning. “This two- to three-year view is about making those key, strategic bets for growth that we can fine-tune to get the business to the next level,” she explains. “An example is the vision of becoming an AI-first organization in the long term, along with the multiyear strategy for reimagining roles, tools, and training across the company to get us there.”

Second is annual planning. “A two- to three-year roadmap doesn’t mean the work is done. We need to look at it quarterly or more to track and apply learnings. This cadence is especially important for re-evaluating budgeting, as we balance spending on new technology investments, like AI, against key infrastructure needs.”

And third is monthly planning. Romack illustrates this angle using her approach to AI as an example. “With AI, we’re focused on innovating and getting to value fast, so we take quick wins out of the box, then scale, and adjust our plans monthly or weekly as needed,” she says. “This involves regularly reviewing value metrics for AI like adoption, sentiment, productivity, and effectiveness. A faster cycle helps maintain the momentum and adaptability needed to generate returns and align to key business drivers.”