Getting a seat at the table is your first objective in building a strategic roadmap. Knowing what the business wants to do and understanding what it will need in the future is a challenge for most IT departments.
This could be a challenge such as:
Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
In this section you will develop a vision and mission statement and set goals that align with the business vision and goals. The outcome will deliver your guiding principles and a list of goals that will determine your initiatives and their priorities.
Consider your future state by looking at technology that will help the business in the future. Complete an analysis of your past spending to determine your future spend. Complete a SWOT analysis to determine suitability.
Develop a risk framework that may slow or hinder your strategic initiatives from progressing and evaluate your technical debt. What is the current state of your infrastructure? Generate and prioritize your initiatives, and set dates for completion.
After creating your roadmap, communicate it to your audience. Identify who needs to be informed and create an executive brief with the template download. Finally, create KPIs to measure what success looks like.
Infrastructure roadmaps are an absolute necessity for all organizations. An organization's size often dictates the degree of complexity of the roadmap, but they all strive to paint the future picture of the organization's IT infrastructure.
Infrastructure roadmaps typically start with the current state of infrastructure and work on how to improve. That thinking must change! Start with the future vision, an unimpeded vision, as if there were no constraints. Now you can see where you want to be.
Look at your past to determine how you have been spending your infrastructure budget. If your past shows a trend of increased operational expenditures, that trend will likely continue. The same is true for capital spending and staffing numbers.
Now that you know where you want to go, and how you ended up where you are, look at the constraints you must deal with and make a plan. It's not as difficult as it may seem, and even the longest journey begins with one step.
Speaking of that first step, it should be to understand the business goals and align your roadmap with those same goals. Now you have a solid plan to develop a strategic infrastructure roadmap; enjoy the journey!
There are many reasons why you need to build a strategic IT infrastructure roadmap, but your primary objectives are to set the long-term direction, build a framework for decision making, create a foundation for operational planning, and be able to explain to the business what you are planning. It is a basis for accountability and sets out goals and priorities for the future.
Other than knowing where you are going there are four key benefits to building the roadmap.
When complete, you will be able to communicate to your fellow IT teams what you are doing and get an understanding of possible business- or IT-related roadblocks, but overall executing on your roadmap will demonstrate to the business your competencies and ability to succeed.
PJ Ryan
Research Director
Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
John Donovan
Principal Research Director
Infrastructure & Operations Practice
Info-Tech Research Group
Your Challenge
When it comes to building a strategic roadmap, getting a seat at the table is your first objective. Knowing what the business wants to do and understanding its future needs is a challenge for most IT organizations.
Challenges such as:
Common Obstacles
Fighting fires, keeping the lights on, patching, and overseeing legacy debt maintenance – these activities prevent your IT team from thinking strategically and looking beyond day-to-day operations. Issues include:
Procrastinating when it comes to thinking about your future state will get you nowhere in a hurry.
Info-Tech's Approach
Look into your past IT spend and resources that are being utilized.
Build your roadmap by setting priorities, understanding risk and gaps both in finance and resources. Overall, your roadmap is never done, so don't worry if you get it wrong on the first pass.
Info-Tech Insight
Have a clear vision of what the future state is, and know that when creating an IT infrastructure roadmap, it is never done. This will give your IT team an understanding of priorities, goals, business vision, and risks associated with not planning. Understand what you are currently paying for and why.
"Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now."
Source: Alan Lakein, Libquotes
Many organizations' day-to-day IT operations are tactical and reactive. This needs to change; the IT team needs to become strategic and proactive in its planning and execution. Forward thinking bridges the gap from your current state, to what the organization is, to what it wants to achieve. Your strategic objectives need to align to the business vision and goals and keep it running.
Identify what the business needs to meet its goals; this should be reflected in your roadmap priorities. Then identify the tasks and projects that can get you there. Business alignment is key, as these projects require prioritization. Strategic initiatives that align to business outcomes will be your foundation for planning on those priorities. If you do not align your initiatives, you will end up spinning your wheels. A good strategic roadmap will have all the elements of forward thinking and planning to execute with the right resources, right priorities, and right funding to make it happen.
Measure the cost of "keeping the lights on" as a baseline for your budget that is earmarked and already spent. Determine if your current spend is holding back innovation due to:
A successful strategic roadmap will be determined when you have a good handle on your current spending patterns and planning for future needs that include resources, budget, and know-how. Without a plan and roadmap, that plan will not get business buy-in or funding.
Time seepage
Technical debt
The strategic IT roadmap allows Dura to stay at the forefront of automotive manufacturing.
INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
SOURCE: Performance Improvement Partners
Challenge
Following the acquisition of Dura, MiddleGround aimed to position Dura as a leader in the automotive industry, leveraging the company's established success spanning over a century.
However, prior limited investments in technology necessitated significant improvements for Dura to optimize its processes and take advantage of digital advancements.
Solution
MiddleGround joined forces with PIP to assess technology risks, expenses, and prospects, and develop a practical IT plan with solutions that fit MiddleGround's value-creation timeline.
By selecting the top 15 most important IT projects, the companies put together a feasible technology roadmap aimed at advancing Dura in the manufacturing sector.
Results
Armed with due diligence reports and a well-defined IT plan, MiddleGround and Dura have a strategic approach to maximizing value creation.
By focusing on key areas such as analysis, applications, infrastructure and the IT organization, Dura is effectively transforming its operations and shaping the future of the automotive manufacturing industry.
A mere 25% of managers
can list three of the company's
top five priorities.
Based on a study from MIT Sloan, shared understanding of strategic directives barely exists beyond the top tiers of leadership.
29% |
Less than one-third of all IT projects finish on time. |
---|---|
200% |
85% of IT projects average cost overruns of 200% and time overruns of 70%. |
70% |
70% of IT workers feel as though they have too much work and not enough time to do it. |
Source: MIT Sloan
Refresh strategies are still based on truisms (every three years for servers, every seven years for LAN, etc.) more than risk-based approaches.
Opportunity Cost
Assets that were suitable to enable business goals need to be re-evaluated as those goals change.
See Info-Tech's Manage Your Technical Debt blueprint
Initiatives collectively support the business goals and corporate initiatives, and improve the delivery of IT services.
A CIO has three roles: enable business productivity, run an effective IT shop, and drive technology innovation. Your key initiative plan must reflect these three mandates and how IT strives to fulfill them.
Manage
the lifecycle of aging equipment against current capacity and capability demands.
Curate
a portfolio of enabling technologies to meet future capacity and capability demands.
Initiate
a realistic schedule of initiatives that supports a diverse range of business goals.
Adapt
to executive feedback and changing business goals.
(Source: BMC)
Business metric | Source(s) | Primary infrastructure drivers | Secondary infrastructure drivers |
---|---|---|---|
Sales revenue |
Online store |
Website/Server (for digital businesses) |
|
# of new customers |
Call center |
Physical plant cabling in the call center |
|
You may not be able to directly influence the primary drivers of the business, but your infrastructure can have a major impact as a secondary driver.
Mission and Vision Statement
Goal Alignment (Slide 28)
Construct your vision and mission aligned to the business.
Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap tool
Build initiatives and prioritize them. Build the roadmap.
Infrastructure Domain Study
What is stealing your time from getting projects done?
Initiative Templates Process Maps & Strategy
Build templates for initiates, build process map, and develop strategies.
“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”
“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”
“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”
“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”
1. Align Strategy and Goals |
2. Envision Future and Analyze Constraints |
3. Align and Build the Roadmap |
4. Communicate and Improve the Process |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
Phase steps |
1.1 Develop the infrastructure strategy 1.2 Define the goals |
2.1 Define the future state 2.2 Analyze constraints |
3.1 Align the roadmap 3.2 Build the roadmap |
4.1 Identify the audience 4.2 Improve the process |
Phase Outcomes |
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|
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Phase 0 | Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Call #1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges. |
Call #2: Define mission and vision statements and guiding principles to discuss strategy scope. |
Call #4: Conduct a spend analysis and a time resource study. |
Call #6: Develop a risk framework and address technical debt. |
Call #10: Identify your audience and communicate. |
A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
A typical GI is 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.
Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
Session 0 (Pre-workshop) |
Session 1 |
Session 2 |
Session 3 |
Session 4 |
Session 5 (Post-workshop) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Elicit business context | Align Strategy and Goals | Envision Future and Analyze Constraints | Align and Build the Roadmap | Communicate and Improve the Process | Wrap-up (offsite) |
0.1 Complete recommended diagnostic programs. |
1.1 Infrastructure strategy. 1.2 Business goal alignment |
2.1 Define the future state. 2.2 Analyze your constraints |
3.1 Align the roadmap 3.2 Build the roadmap. |
4.2 Identify the audience 4.2 Improve the process |
5.1 Complete in-progress deliverables from previous four days. |
|
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Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 |
---|---|---|---|
1.1 Infrastructure strategy 1.2 Goal alignment | 2.1 Define your future 2.2 Conduct constraints analysis | 3.1 Drive business alignment 3.2. Build the roadmap | 4.1 Identify the audience 4.2 Process improvement and measurements |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants:
1.1.1 Review/validate the business context
1.1.2 Construct your mission and vision statements
1.1.3 Elicit your guiding principles and finalize IT strategy scope
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Use the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template to document the results from the following activities:
A mission statement
"A mission statement focuses on the purpose of the brand; the vision statement looks to the fulfillment of that purpose."
A vision statement
"A vision statement provides a concrete way for stakeholders, especially employees, to understand the meaning and purpose of your business. However, unlike a mission statement – which describes the who, what, and why of your business – a vision statement describes the desired long-term results of your company's efforts."
Source: Business News Daily, 2020
A strong mission statement has the following characteristics:
A strong vision statement has the following characteristics:
Ensure there is alignment between the business and IT statements.
Note: Mission statements may remain the same unless the IT department's mandate is changing.
Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).
Step 1:
Step 2:
Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
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Objective: Help teams define their purpose (why they exist) to build a mission statement (if one doesn't already exist).
This step involves reviewing individual mission statements, combining them, and building one collective mission statement for the team.
Use the 20x20 rule for group decision-making. Give the group no more than 20 minutes to craft a collective team purpose with no more than 20 words.
Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
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Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
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Step 5:
Step 6:
Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
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Source: Hyper Island
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Strong IT mission statements have the following characteristics:
Sample IT Mission Statements:
Strong IT vision statements have the following characteristics:
Sample IT vision statements:
Quoted From ITtoolkit, 2020
INDUSTRY: Professional Services
COMPANY: This case study is based on a real company but was anonymized for use in this research.
Business |
IT | ||
---|---|---|---|
Mission |
Vision |
Mission |
Vision |
We help IT leaders achieve measurable results by systematically improving core IT processes, governance, and critical technology projects. |
Acme Corp. will grow to become the largest research firm across the industry by providing unprecedented value to our clients. |
IT provides innovative product solutions and leadership that drives growth and success. |
We will relentlessly drive value to our customers through unprecedented innovation. |
Strategic guiding principles advise the IT organization on the boundaries of the strategy.
Guiding principles are a priori decisions that limit the scope of strategic thinking to what is acceptable organizationally, from budgetary, people, and partnership standpoints. Guiding principles can cover other dimensions, as well.
Organizational stakeholders are more likely to follow IT principles when a rationale is provided.
After defining the set of IT principles, ensure that they are all expanded upon with a rationale. The rationale ensures principles are more likely to be followed because they communicate why the principles are important and how they are to be used. Develop the rationale for each IT principle your organization has chosen.
IT guiding principles = IT strategy boundaries
Breadth
of the IT strategy can span across the eight perspectives: people, process, technology, data, process, sourcing, location, and timing.
Defining which of the eight perspectives is in scope for the IT strategy is crucial to ensuring the IT strategy will be comprehensive, relevant, and actionable.
Depth
of coverage refers to the level of detail the IT strategy will go into for each perspective. Info-Tech recommends that depth should go to the initiative level (i.e. individual projects).
Organizational coverage
will determine which part of the organization the IT strategy will cover.
Planning horizon
of the IT strategy will dictate when the target state should be reached and the length of the roadmap.
Approach focused | IT principles are focused on the approach, i.e. how the organization is built, transformed, and operated, as opposed to what needs to be built, which is defined by both functional and non-functional requirements. |
---|---|
Business relevant | Create IT principles that are specific to the organization. Tie IT principles to the organization's priorities and strategic aspirations. |
Long lasting | Build IT principles that will withstand the test of time. |
Prescriptive | Inform and direct decision-making with IT principles that are actionable. Avoid truisms, general statements, and observations. |
Verifiable | If compliance can't be verified, the principle is less likely to be followed. |
Easily digestible | IT principles must be clearly understood by everyone in IT and by business stakeholders. IT principles aren't a secret manuscript of the IT team. IT principles should be succinct; wordy principles are hard to understand and remember. |
Followed | Successful IT principles represent a collection of beliefs shared among enterprise stakeholders. IT principles must be continuously reinforced to all stakeholders to achieve and maintain buy-in. In organizations where formal policy enforcement works well, IT principles should be enforced through appropriate governance processes. |
IT principle name |
IT principle statement |
---|---|
1. Enterprise value focus | We aim to provide maximum long-term benefits to the enterprise as a whole while optimizing total costs of ownership and risks. |
2. Fit for purpose | We maintain capability levels and create solutions that are fit for purpose without over engineering them. |
3. Simplicity | We choose the simplest solutions and aim to reduce operational complexity of the enterprise. |
4. Reuse > buy > build | We maximize reuse of existing assets. If we can't reuse, we procure externally. As a last resort, we build custom solutions. |
5. Managed data | We handle data creation, modification, and use enterprise-wide in compliance with our data governance policy. |
6. Controlled technical diversity | We control the variety of technology platforms we use. |
7. Managed security | We manage security enterprise-wide in compliance with our security governance policy. |
8. Compliance to laws and regulations | We operate in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. |
9. Innovation | We seek innovative ways to use technology for business advantage. |
10. Customer centricity | We deliver best experiences to our customers with our services and products. |
Source: Hyper Island
Download the ITRG IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
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Quoted From: Office of Information Technology, 2014; Future of CIO, 2013
INDUSTRY: Professional Services
COMPANY: Acme Corp.
The following guiding principles define the values that drive IT's strategy in FY23 and provide the criteria for our 12-month planning horizon.
Your mission and vision statements and your guiding principles should be the first things you communicate on your IT strategy document.
Why is this important?
Input information into the IT Strategy Presentation Template.
If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop
Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
1.2.1 Intake identification and analysis
1.2.2 Survey results analysis
1.2.3 Goal brainstorming
1.2.4 Goal association and analysis
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
"Typically, IT thinks in an IT first, business second, way: 'I have a list of problems and if I solve them, the business will benefit.' This is the wrong way of thinking. The business needs to be thought of first, then IT."
– Fred Chagnon, Infrastructure Director,
Info-Tech Research Group
If you're not soliciting input from or delivering on the needs of the various departments in your company, then who is? Be explicit and track how you communicate with each individual unit within your company.
It may not be a democracy, but listening to everyone's voice is an essential step toward generating a useful roadmap.
Building good infrastructure requires an understanding of how it will be used. Explicit consultation with stakeholders maximizes a roadmap's usefulness and holds the enterprise accountable in future roadmap iterations as goals change.
Who are the customers for infrastructure?
Internal customer examples:
External customer examples:
Discussion:
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INDUSTRY: Education
COMPANY: Collegis Education
Challenge
In 2019, Saint Francis University decided to expand its online program offering to reach students outside of its market.
It had to first transform its operations to deliver a high-quality, technology-enabled student experience on and off campus. The remote location of the campus posed power outages, Wi-Fi issues, and challenges in attracting and retaining the right staff to help the university achieve its goals.
It began working with an IT consulting firm to build a long-term strategic roadmap.
Solution
The consultant designed a strategic multi-year roadmap for digital transformation that would prioritize developing infrastructure to immediately improve the student experience and ultimately enable the university to scale its online programs. The consultant worked with school leadership to establish a virtual CIO to oversee the IT department's strategy and operations. The virtual CIO quickly became a key advisor to the president and board, identifying gaps between technology initiatives and enrollment and revenue targets. St. Francis staff also transitioned to the consultant's technology team, allowing the university to alleviate its talent acquisition and retention challenges.
Results
A simple graph showing the breakdown of projects by business unit is an excellent visualization of who is getting the most from infrastructure services.
Show everyone in the organization that the best way to get anything done is by availing themselves of the roadmap process.
Technology-focused IT staff are notoriously disconnected from the business process and are therefore often unable to explain the outcomes of their projects in terms that are meaningful to the business.
When business, IT, and infrastructure goals are aligned, the business story writes itself as you follow the path of cascading goals upward.
So many organizations we speak with don't have goals written down. This rarely means that the goals aren't known, rather that they're not clearly communicated.
When goals aren't clear, personal agendas can take precedence. This is what often leads to the disconnect between what the business wants and what IT is delivering.
Discussion:
Examples: The VP of Operations is looking to reduce office rental costs over the next three years. The VP of Sales is focused on increasing the number of face-to-face customer interactions. Both can potentially be served by IT activities and technologies that increase mobility.
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Discussion:
Is there a lot of agreement within the group? What does it mean if there are 10 or 15 groups with equal numbers of sticky notes? What does it mean if there are a few top groups and dozens of small outliers?
How does the group's understanding compare with that of the Director and/or CIO?
What mechanisms are in place for the business to communicate their goals to infrastructure? Are they effective? Does the team take the time to reimagine those goals and internalize them?
What does it mean if infrastructure's understanding differs from the business?
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Now that infrastructure has a consensus on what it thinks the business' goals are, suggest a meeting with leadership to validate this understanding. Once the first picture is drawn, a 30-minute meeting can help clear up any misconceptions.
With a framework of cascading goals in place, a roadmap is a Rosetta Stone. Being able to map activities back to governance objectives allows you to demonstrate value regardless of the audience you are addressing.
(Info-Tech, Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy 2022)
Wherever possible use the language of your customers to avoid confusion, but at least ensure that everyone in infrastructure is using a common language.
Discussion:
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If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop
Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 |
---|---|---|---|
1.1 Infrastructure strategy 1.2 Goal alignment | 2.1 Define your future 2.2 Conduct constraints analysis | 3.1 Drive business alignment 3.2. Build the roadmap | 4.1 Identify the audience 4.2 Process improvement and measurements |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants:
2.1.1 Define your future infrastructure vision
2.1.2 Document desired future state
2.1.3 Develop a new technology identification process
2.1.4 Conduct a SWOT analysis
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
"Very few of us are lucky enough to be one of the first few employees in a new organization. Those of you who get to plan the infrastructure with a blank slate and can focus all of your efforts on doing things right the first time."
BMC, 2018
"A company's future state is ultimately defined as the greater vision for the business. It's where you want to be, your long-term goal in terms of the ever-changing state of technology and how that applies to your present-day business."
"Without a definitive future state, a company will often find themselves lacking direction, making it harder to make pivotal decisions, causing misalignment amongst executives, and ultimately hindering the progression and growth of a company's mission."
Source: Third Stage Consulting
"When working with digital technologies, it is imperative to consider how such technologies can enhance the solution. The future state should communicate the vision of how digital technologies will enhance the solutions, deliver value, and enable further development toward even greater value creation."
Source: F. Milani
Define your infrastructure roadmap as if you had a blank slate – no constraints, no technical debt, and no financial limitations. Imagine your future infrastructure and let that vision drive your roadmap.
This is not intended to be a thesis grade research project, nor an onerous duty. Most infrastructure practitioners came to the field because of an innate excitement about technology! Harness that excitement and give them four to eight hours to indulge themselves.
An output of approximately four slides per technology candidate should be sufficient to decided if moving to PoC or pilot is warranted.
Including this material in the roadmap helps you control the technology conversation with your audience.
Don't start from scratch. Recall the original sources from your technology watchlist. Leverage vendors and analyst firms (such as Info-Tech) to give the broad context, letting you focus instead on the specifics relevant to your business.
Implementing every new promising technology would cost prodigious amounts of money and time. Know the costs before choosing what to invest in.
The risk of a new technology failing is acceptable. The risk of that failure disrupting adjacent core functions is unacceptable. Vet potential technologies to ensure they can be safely integrated.
Best practices for new technologies are nonexistent, standards are in flux, and use cases are fuzzy. Be aware of the unforeseen that will negatively affect your chances of a successful implementation.
"Like early pioneers crossing the American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow in the ruts."
Harper Business, 2014
The right technology for someone else can easily be the wrong technology for your business.
Even with a mature Enterprise Architecture practice, wrong technology bets can happen. Minimize the chance of this occurrence by making selection an infrastructure-wide activity. Leverage the practical knowledge of the day-to-day operators.
First Mover |
47% failure rate |
Fast Follower |
8% failure rate |
Objective: Help teams define their future infrastructure state (assuming zero constraints or limitations).
Discussion:
Download the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template and document your mission and vision statements in Section 1.
Input
Output
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Participants
Steps:
Discussion:
Infrastructure Future State Vision | ||
---|---|---|
Item | Focus Area | Future Vision |
1 | Residing on Microsoft 365 | |
2 | Servers | Hosted in cloud - nothing on prem. |
3 | Endpoints | virtual desktops on Microsoft Azure |
4 | Endpoint hardware | Chromebooks |
5 | Network | internet only |
6 | Backups | cloud based but stored in multiple cloud services |
7 |
Download Info-Tech's Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Tool and document your future state vision in the Infrastructure Future State tab.
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Discussion:
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It is impractical for everyone to present their tech briefing at the monthly meeting. But you want to avoid a one-to-many exercise. Keep the presenter a secret until called on. Those who do not present live can still contribute their material to the technology watchlist database.
Four to eight hours of research per technology can uncover a wealth of relevant information and prepare the infrastructure team for a robust discussion. Key research elements include:
Download the IT Infrastructure Strategy and Roadmap Report Template slides 21, 22, 23 for sample output.
Beware airline magazine syndrome! |
Symptoms |
Pathology |
---|---|---|
|
Outbreaks tend to occur in close proximity to
|
Effective treatment options
While no permanent cure exists, regular treatment makes this chronic syndrome manageable.
You want to present a curated landscape of technologies, demonstrating that you are actively maintaining expertise in your chosen field.
Most enterprise IT shops buy rather than develop their technology, which means they want to focus effort on what is market available. The outcome is that infrastructure sponsors and delivers new technologies whose capabilities and features will help the business achieve its goals on this roadmap.
If you want to think more like a business disruptor or innovator, we suggest working through the blueprint Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology.
Explore technology five to ten years into the future!
The ROI of any individual effort is difficult to justify – in aggregate, however, the enterprise always wins!
Money spent on Google Glass in 2013 seemed like vanity. Certainly, this wasn't enterprise-ready technology. But those early experiences positioned some visionary firms to quickly take advantage of augmented reality in 2018. Creative research tends to pay off in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
.
Discussion:
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2.2.1 Historical spend analysis
2.2.2 Conduct a time study
2.2.3 Identify roadblocks
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
"A Budget is telling your money where to go, instead of wondering where it went."
-David Ramsay
"Don't tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are"
-James Frick, Due.com
Annual IT budgeting aligns with business goals | |
50% of businesses surveyed see that improvements are necessary for IT budgets to align to business goals, while 18% feel they require significant improvements to align to business goals |
|
Challenges in IT spend visibility |
|
Visibility of all spend data for on-prem, SaaS and cloud environments |
|
The challenges that keep IT leaders up at night |
|
Lack of visibility in resource usage and cost |
Download the Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Analysis Tool
( additional Deep Dive available if required)
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Download the Infrastructure Roadmap Financial Analysis Tool
( additional Deep Dive available if required)
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Internal divisions that seem important to infrastructure may have little or even negative value when it comes to users accessing their services.
Domains are the logical divisions of work within an infrastructure practice. Historically, the organization was based around physical assets: servers, storage, networking, and end-user devices. Staff had skills they applied according to specific best practices using physical objects that provided functionality (computing power, persistence, connectivity, and interface).
Modern enterprises may find it more effective to divide according to activity (analytics, programming, operations, and security) or function (customer relations, learning platform, content management, and core IT). As a rule, look to your organizational chart; managers responsible for buying, building, deploying, or supporting technologies should each be responsible for their own domain.
Regardless of structure, poor organization leads to silos of marginally interoperable efforts working against each other, without focus on a common goal. Clearly defined domains ensure responsibility and allow for rapid, accurate, and confident decision making.
The medium is the message. Do stakeholders talk about switches or storage or services? Organizing infrastructure to match its external perception can increase communication effectiveness and improve alignment.
IT infrastructure that makes employees happier
INDUSTRY: Services
SOURCE: Network Doctor
Challenge
Atlas Electric's IT infrastructure was very old and urgently needed to be refreshed. Its existing server hardware was about nine years old and was becoming unstable. The server was running Windows 2008 R2 server operating systems that was no longer supported by Microsoft; security updates and patches were no longer available. They also experienced slowdowns on many older PCs.
Recommendations for an upgrade were not approved due to budgetary constraints. Recommendations for upgrading to virtual servers were approved following a harmful phishing attack.
Solution
The following improvements to their infrastructure were implemented.
Results
Virtualization, consolidating servers, and desktops have made assets more flexible and simpler to manage.
Improved levels of efficiency, reliability, and productivity.
Enhanced security level.
An upgraded backup and disaster recovery system has improved risk management.
Not all time is spent equally, nor is it equally valuable. Analysis lets us communicate with others and gives us a shared framework to decide where our priorities lie.
There are lots of frameworks to help categorize our activities. Stephen Covey (Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) describes a four-quadrant system along the axes of importance and urgency. Gene Kim, through his character Erik in The Phoenix Project,speaks instead of business projects, internal IT projects, changes, and unplanned work.
We propose a similar four-category system.
Project | Maintenance | Administrative |
Reactive |
---|---|---|---|
Planned activity spent pursuing a business objective |
Planned activity spent on the upkeep of existing IT systems |
Planned activity required as a condition of employment |
Unplanned activity requiring immediate response |
This is why we are valuable to our company |
We have it in our power to work to reduce these three in order to maximize our time available for projects |
Verifiable data sources are always preferred but large groups can hold each other's inherent biases in check to get a reasonable estimate.
Discussion
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 2, Capacity Analysis
In order to quickly and easily build some visualizations for the eventual final report, Info-Tech has developed the Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool.
Please note that this tool requires Microsoft's Power Pivot add-in to be installed if you are using Excel 2010 or 2013. The scatter plot labels on tabs 5 and 8 may not function correctly in Excel 2010.
Strong IT strategy favors top-down: activities enabling clearly dictated goals. The bottom-up approach aggregates ongoing activities into goals.
Systematic approach
External stakeholders prioritize a list of goals requiring IT initiatives to achieve.
Roadblocks:
Organic approach
Practitioners aggregate initiatives into logical groups and seek to align them to one or more business goals.
Roadblocks:
A successful roadmap respects both approaches.
Perfection is anathema to practicality. Draw the first picture and not only expect but welcome conflicting feedback! Socialize it and drive the conversation forward to a consensus.
Identify the systemic roadblocks to executing infrastructure projects
1 hour
Affinity diagramming is a form of structured brainstorming that works well with larger groups and provokes discussion.
Discussion
Categorize each roadblock identified as either internal or external to infrastructure's control.
Attempt to understand the root cause of each roadblock. What would you need to ask for in order to remove the roadblock?
Additional Research
Also called the KJ Method (after its inventor, Jiro Kawakita, a 1960s Japanese anthropologist), this activity helps organize large amounts of data into groupings based on natural relationships while reducing many social biases.
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Which roadblocks do you need to work on? How do you establish a group sense of these priorities? This exercise helps establish priorities while reducing individual bias.
Total the number of passes (ticks) for each roadblock. A large number indicates a notionally low priority. No passes indicates a high priority.
Are the internal or external roadblocks of highest priority? Were there similarities among participants' 0th and NILs compared to each other or to the final results?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Review performance from last fiscal year
If you would like additional support, have our analysts guide you through other phases as part of an Info-Tech workshop
Contact your account representative for more information.
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Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 |
---|---|---|---|
1.1 Infrastructure strategy 1.2 Goal alignment | 2.1 Define your future 2.2 Conduct constraints analysis | 3.1 Drive business alignment 3.2. Build the roadmap | 4.1 Identify the audience 4.2 Process improvement and measurements |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants:
3.1.1 Develop a risk framework
3.1.2 Evaluate technical debt
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
Outcomes of this step
Time has been a traditional method for assessing the fitness of infrastructure assets – servers are replaced every five years, core switches every seven, laptops and desktops every three. While quick, this framework of assessment is overly simplistic for most modern organizations.
Building one that is instead based on the likelihood of asset failure plotted against the business impact of that failure is not overly burdensome and yields more practical results. Infrastructure focuses on its strength (assessing IT risk) and validates an understanding with the business regarding the criticality of the service(s) enabled by any given asset.
Rather than fight on every asset individually, agree on a framework with the business that enables data-driven decision making.
IT Risk Factors
Age, Reliability, Serviceability, Conformity, Skill Set
Business Risk Factors
Suitability, Capacity, Safety, Criticality
Infrastructure in a cloud-enabled world: As infrastructure operations evolve it is important to keep current with the definition of an asset. Software platforms such as hypervisors and server OS are just as much an asset under the care and control of infrastructure as are cloud services, managed services from third-party providers, and traditional racks and switches.
Discussion:
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Identify the key elements that make up risk in order to refine your framework.
A shared notional understanding is good, but in order to bring the business onside a documented defensible framework is better.
Discussion
How difficult was it to agree on the definitions of the IT risk elements? What about selecting the scale? What was the voting distribution like? Were there tiers of popular elements or did most of the dots end up on a limited number of elements? What are the implications of having more elements in the analysis?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Alternate: Identify the key elements that make up risk in order to refine your framework
A shared notional understanding is good, but in order to bring the business onside a documented defensible framework is better.
1 hour
What was the total number of elements required in order to contain the full set of every participant's first-, second-, and third-ranked risks? Does this seem a reasonable number?
Why did some elements contain both the lowest and highest rankings? Was one (or more) participant thinking consistently different from the rest of the group? Are they seeing something the rest of the group is overlooking?
This technique automatically puts the focus on a smaller number of elements – is this effective? Or is it overly simplistic and reductionist?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
How much framework is too much? Complexity and granularity do not guarantee accuracy. What is the right balance between effort and result?
Does your granular assessment match your notional assessment? Why or why not? Do you need to go back and change weightings? Or reduce complexity?
Is this a more reasonable and valuable way of periodically evaluating your infrastructure?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
3.2.1 Build templates and visualize
3.2.2 Generate new initiatives
3.2.3 Repatriate shadow IT initiatives
3.2.4 Finalize initiative candidates
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
Develop a high-level document that travels with the initiative from inception through executive inquiry and project management, and finally to execution. Understand an initiative's key elements that both IT and the business need defined and that are relatively static over its lifecycle.
Initiatives are the waypoints along a roadmap leading to the eventual destination, each bringing you one step closer. Like steps, initiatives need to be discrete: able to be conceptualized and discussed as a single largely independent item. Each initiative must have two characteristics:
"Learn a new skill"– not an effective initiative statement.
"Be proficient in the new skill by the end of the year" – better.
"Use the new skill to complete a project and present it at a conference by Dec 15" – best!
Info-Tech Insight
Bundle your initiatives for clarity and manageability.
Ruthlessly evaluate if an initiative should stand alone or can be rolled up with another. Fewer initiatives increases focus and alignment, allowing for better communication.
Step 1: Open Info-Tech's Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template. Determine and describe the goals that the initiative is enabling or supporting.
Step 2: State the current pain points from the end-user or business perspective. Do not list IT-specific pain points here, such as management complexity.
Step 3: List both the tangible (quantitative) and ancillary (qualitative) benefits of executing the project. These can be pain relievers derived from the pain points, or any IT-specific benefit not captured in Step 1.
Step 4: List any enabled capability that will come as an output of the project. Avoid technical capabilities like "Application-aware network monitoring." Instead, shoot for business outcomes like "Ability to filter network traffic based on application type."
Sell the project to the mailroom clerk! You need to be able to explain the outcome of the project in terms that non-IT workers can appreciate. This is done by walking as far up the goals cascade as you have defined, which gets to the underlying business outcome that the initiative supports.
Strategic Roadmap Initiative Template, p. 2
Step 5: State the risks to the business for not executing the project (and avoid restating the pain points).
Step 6: List any known or anticipated roadblocks that may come before, during, or after executing the project. Consider all aspects of people, process, and technology.
Step 7: List any measurable objectives that can be used to gauge the success of the projects. Avoid technical metrics like "number of IOPS." Instead think of business metrics such as "increased orders per hour."
Step 8: The abstract is a short 50-word project description. Best to leave it as the final step after all the other aspects of the project (risks and rewards) have been fully fleshed out. The abstract acts as an executive summary – written last, read first.
Every piece of information that is not directly relevant to the interests of the audience is a distraction from the value proposition.
Discussion:
Did everyone use the goal framework adopted earlier? Why not?
Are there recurring topics or issues that business leaders always seem concerned about?
Of all the information available, what consistently seems to be the talking points when discussing an initiative?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap Tool, Tab 8, "Roadmap"
Visuals aren't always as clear as we assume them to be.
We've spent an awful lot of time setting the stage, deciding on frameworks so we agree on what is important. We know how to have an effective conversation – now what do we want to say?
Discussion:
Did everyone use the goal framework adopted earlier? Why not?
Do we think we can find business buy-in or sponsorship? Why or why not?
Are our initiatives at odds with or complementary to the ones proposed through the normal channels?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Discussion:
Do participants tend to think their idea is the best and rank it accordingly?
If so, then is it better to look at the second, third, and fourth rankings for consensus instead?
What is a reasonable number of initiatives to suggest? How do we limit ourselves?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Shadow IT operates outside of the governance and control structure of Enterprise IT and so is, by definition, a problem. an opportunity!
Except for that one thing they do wrong, that one small technicality, they may well do everything else right.
Consider:
In short, shadow IT can provide fully vetted infrastructure initiatives that with a little effort can be turned into easy wins on the roadmap.
Shadow IT can include business-ready initiatives, needing only minor tweaking to align with infrastructure's best practices.
Discussion:
Did you learn anything from working directly with in-the-trenches staff? Can those learnings be used elsewhere in infrastructure? Or in larger IT?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Also called scrum poker (in Agile software circles), this method reduces anchoring bias by requiring all participants to formulate and submit their estimates independently and simultaneously.
Equipment: A typical scrum deck shows the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, or similar progression, with the added values of ∞ (project too big and needs to be subdivided), and a coffee cup (need a break). Use of the (mostly) Fibonacci sequence helps capture the notional uncertainty in estimating larger values.
Discussion:
How often was the story unclear? How often did participants have to ask for additional information to make their estimate? How many rounds were required to reach consensus?
Does number of person, days, or weeks, make more sense than dollars? Should we estimate both independently?
Source: Scrum Poker
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Add your ideas to the visualization.
We started with eight simple questions. Logically, the answers suggest sections for a published report. Developing those answers in didactic method is effective and popular among technologists as answers build upon each other. Business leaders and journalists, however, know never to bury the lead.
Report Section Title | Roadmap Activity or Step |
---|---|
Sunshine diagram | Visualization |
Priorities | Understand business goals |
Who we help | Evaluate intake process |
How we can help | Create initiatives |
What we're working on | Review initiatives |
How you can help us | Assess roadblocks |
What is new | Assess new technology |
How we spend our day | Conduct a time study |
What we have | Assess IT platform |
We can do better! | Identify process optimizations |
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Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 |
---|---|---|---|
1.1 Infrastructure strategy 1.2 Goal alignment | 2.1 Define your future 2.2 Conduct constraints analysis | 3.1 Drive business alignment 3.2. Build the roadmap | 4.1 Identify the audience 4.2 Process improvement and measurements |
This phase will walk you through the following activities:
This phase involves the following participants:
Identify the audience
4.1.1 Identify required authors and target audiences
4.1.2 Planning the process
4.1.3 Identifying supporters and blockers
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
And you thought we were done. The roadmap is a process. Set a schedule and pattern to the individual steps.
Publishing an infrastructure roadmap once a year as a lead into budget discussion is common practice. But this is just the last in a long series of steps and activities. Balance the effort of each activity against its results to decide on a frequency. Ensure that the frequency is sufficient to allow you to act on the results if required. Work backwards from publication to develop the schedule.
A lot of work has gone into creating this final document. Does a single audience make sense? Who else may be interested in your promises to the business? Look back at the people you've asked for input. They probably want to know what this has all been about. Publish your roadmap broadly to ensure greater participation in subsequent years.
Who needs to hear (and more importantly believe) your message? Who do you need to hear from? Build a communications plan to get the most from your roadmap effort.
Discussion:
How many people appear in both lists? What are the implications of that?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Due Date (t) | Freq | Mode | Participants | Infrastructure Owner | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Update & Publish | Start of Budget Planning |
Once |
Report |
IT Steering Committee |
Infrastructure Leader or CIO |
Evaluate Intakes | (t) - 2 months (t) - 8 months |
Biannually |
Review |
PMO Service Desk |
Domain Heads |
Assess Roadblocks | (t) - 2 months (t) - 5 months (t) - 8 months (t) - 11 months |
Quarterly |
Brainstorming & Consensus |
Domain Heads |
Infrastructure Leader |
Time Study | (t) - 1 month (t) - 4 months (t) - 7 months (t) - 10 months |
Quarterly |
Assessment |
Domain Staff |
Domain Heads |
Inventory Assessment | (t) - 2 months |
Annually |
Assessment |
Domain Staff |
Domain Heads |
Business Goals | (t) - 1 month |
Annually |
Survey |
Line of Business Managers |
Infrastructure Leader or CIO |
New Technology Assessment | monthly (t) - 2 months |
Monthly/Annually |
Process |
Domain Staff |
Infrastructure Leader |
Initiative Review | (t) - 1 month (t) - 4 months (t) - 7 months (t) - 10 months |
Quarterly |
Review |
PMO Domain Heads |
Infrastructure Leader |
Initiative Creation | (t) - 1 month |
Annually |
Brainstorming & Consensus |
Roadmap Team |
Infrastructure Leader |
The roadmap report is just a point-in-time snapshot, but to be most valuable it needs to come at the end of a full process cycle. Know your due date, work backwards, and assign responsibility.
Discussion:
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Certain stakeholders will not only be highly involved and accountable in the process but may also be responsible for approving the roadmap and budget, so it's essential that you get their buy-in upfront.
You may want to restrict participation to senior members of the roadmap team only.
This activity requires a considerable degree of candor in order to be effective. It is effectively a political conversation and as such can be sensitive.
Steps:
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
4.2.1 Evaluating the value of each process output
4.2.2 Brainstorming improvements
4.2.3 Setting realistic measures
This step requires the following inputs:
This step involves the following participants:
You started with a desire – greater satisfaction with infrastructure from the business. All of the inputs, processes, and outputs exist only, and are designed solely, to serve the attainment of that outcome.
The process outlined is not dogma; no element is sacrosanct. Ruthlessly evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts so you can do better next time.
You would do no less after a server migration, network upgrade, or EUC rollout.
Leadership
If infrastructure leaders aren't committed, then this will quickly become an exercise of box-checking rather than candid communication.
Data
Quantitative or qualitative – always try to go where the data leads. Reduce unconscious bias and be surprised by the insight uncovered.
Metrics
Measurement allows management but if you measure the wrong thing you can game the system, cheating yourself out of the ultimate prize.
Focus
Less is sometimes more.
Discussion:
Did the group agree on the intended outcome of each step? Did the group think the step was effective? Was the outcome clear and did it flow naturally to where it was useful?
Is the effort required for each step commensurate with its value? Are we doing too much for not enough return?
Are we acting on the information we're gathering? Is it informing or changing decisions throughout the year or period?
Input
Output
Materials
Participants
Freq. | Method | Measures | Success criteria | Areas for improvement | Expected change | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Evaluate intakes | Biannually | PMO Intake & Service Requests | Projects or Initiatives | % of departments engaged | Actively reach out to underrepresented depts. | +10% engagement |
Assess roadblocks | Quarterly | IT All-Staff Meeting | Roadblocks | % of identified that have been resolved | Define expected outcomes of removing roadblock | Measurable improvements |
Time study | Quarterly | IT All-Staff Meeting | Time | Confidence value of data | Real data sources (time sheets, tools, etc.) | 85% of sources defensible |
Legacy asset assessment | Annually | Domain effort | Asset Inventory | Completeness of Inventory |
|
|
Understand business goals | Annually | Roadmap Meeting | Goal list | Goal specificity | Survey or interview leadership directly | 66% directly attributable participation |
New technology assessment | Monthly/Annually | Team/Roadmap Meeting | Technologies Reviewed | IT staff participation/# SWOTs | Increase participation from junior members | 50% presentations from junior members |
Initiative review | Quarterly | IT All-Staff Meeting |
|
|
|
|
Initiative creation | Annually | Roadmap Meeting | Initiatives | # of initiatives proposed | Business uptake | +25% sponsorship in 6 months (biz) |
Update and publish | Annually | PDF report | Roadmap Final Report | Leadership engagement | Improve audience reach | +15% of LoB managers have read the report |
Baseline metrics will improve through:
Metric description | Current metric | Future goal |
---|---|---|
# of critical incidents resulting from equipment failure per month | ||
# of service provisioning delays due to resource (non-labor) shortages | ||
# of projects that involve standing up untested (no prior infrastructure PoC) technologies | ||
# of PoCs conducted each year | ||
# of initiatives proposed by infrastructure | ||
# of initiatives proposed that find business sponsorship in >1yr | ||
% of long-term projects reviewed as per goal framework | ||
# of initiatives proposed that are the only ones supporting a business goal | ||
# of technologies deployed being used by more than the original business sponsor | ||
# of PMO delays due to resource contention |
Insight 1
Draw the first picture.
Highly engaged and effective team members are proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for clear inputs from the higher ups, take what you do know, make some educated guesses about the rest, and present that to leadership. Where thinking diverges will be crystal clear and the necessary adjustments will be obvious.
Insight 2
Infrastructure must position itself as the broker for new technologies.
No man is an island; no technology is a silo. Infrastructure's must ensure that everyone in the company benefits from what can be shared, ensure those benefits are delivered securely and reliably, and prevent the uninitiated from making costly technological mistakes. It is easier to lead from the front, so infrastructure must stay on top of available technology.
Insight 3
The roadmap is a process that is business driven and not a document.
In an ever-changing world the process of change itself changes. We know the value of any specific roadmap output diminishes quickly over time, but don't forget to challenge the process itself from time to time. Striving for perfection is a fool's game; embrace constant updates and incremental improvement.
Insight 4
Focus on the framework, not the output.
There usually is no one right answer. Instead make sure both the business and infrastructure are considering common relevant elements and are working from a shared set of priorities. Data then, rather than hierarchical positioning or a d20 Charisma roll, becomes the most compelling factor in making a decision. But since your audience is in hierarchical ascendency over you, make the effort to become familiar with their language.
Metric description | Metric goal |
Checkpoint 1 |
Checkpoint 2 |
Checkpoint 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|
# of critical incidents resulting from equipment failure per month | >1 | |||
# of service provisioning delays due to resource (non-labor) shortages | >5 | |||
# of projects that involve standing up untested (no prior infrastructure PoC) technologies | >10% | |||
# of PoCs conducted each year | 4 | |||
# of initiatives proposed by infrastructure | 4 | |||
# of initiatives proposed that find business sponsorship in >1 year | 1 | |||
# of initiatives proposed that are the only ones supporting a business goal | 1 | |||
% of long-term projects reviewed as per goal framework | 100% |
Review performance from last fiscal year
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Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.
Document your Cloud Strategy
A cloud strategy might seem like a big project, but it's just a series of smaller conversations. The methodology presented here is designed to facilitate those conversations using a curated list of topics, prompts, participant lists, and sample outcomes. We have divided the strategy into four key areas.
Develop an IT Asset Management Strategy
ITAM is a foundational IT service that provides accurate, accessible, actionable data on IT assets. But there's no value in data for data's sake. Enable collaboration between IT asset managers, business leaders, and IT leaders to develop an ITAM strategy that maximizes the value they can deliver as service provider.
Infrastructure & Operations Research Center
Practical insights, tools, and methodologies to systematically improve IT Infrastructure & Operations.
Knowledge gained
Processes optimized
Deliverables completed
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