Creating a detailed technology roadmap for a small/medium business involves careful planning and consideration of the business's goals, resources, and technological needs. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create a comprehensive technology roadmap.
1. Understand Business Goals and Needs:
Identify the overarching business goals and objectives that the technology roadmap should align with. These will include short- and long-term goals and objectives.
List out the specific technology requirements that will support these goals. These may include: improving efficiency, expanding market reach, enhancing customer experience, etc.
Examples:
Goal: Improve company brand and/or reputation
Technical Aspect(s):
* Increase performance and reliability of online resources (especially if you offer: SaaS product(s), services that are initiated via an online tool, etc.)
* Create technical solutions to enhance customer service functions: chatBots to handle "easy" customer service issues, enhanced FAQs, improved internal tools/applications for internal support employees to manage customer issues, etc.
Goal: Increase sales to existing customers
Technical Aspects:
* Implement data analytics to determine customers most likely to buy more/again and create easy to use sales tools to market to and upsell those customers.
* Implement promotion functionality that can be custom tailored to existing customers to enhance the product(s) they have already purchased. This may also include a "Recommendation Engine" that presents customers with similar or complimentary product offerings.
2. Assess Current State of Technology:
Evaluate the existing technology infrastructure, software applications, hardware, and systems being used. What changes (if any) need to be made to support both the short- and long-term goals of the company?
Examples:
Goal: Improve reliability and scalability of online presence as customer demand increases:
* Migrate some/all inhouse server infrastructure to a Cloud-based hosting to make adding more compute and data resources faster/easier. Or, simply plan to expand your in-house infrastructure based on load/usage estimations.
* Take the time to find performance bottlenecks in custom developed applications (internal or customer facing) to reduce server/resource utilization.
* Identify existing pain points, bottlenecks, and areas where technology improvements are needed.
Goal: Gather more customer data to improve sales/marketing
* Add the appropriate "tracking" code to your website/app to gather data
* House said data in an expandable and performant storage environment (cloud database or NOSQL service)
* Provide the necessary analytical tools to derive value from the gathered data to key stakeholders.
3. Gather Stakeholder Input:
Involve key stakeholders, including management, department heads, and IT personnel, to gather insights into their technology requirements and expectations.
Do specific problems or issues exist with internal applications that employees use that is making them less efficient or effective?
Are there systems in use that don’t have all of the functionality to allow the business to reach their goals? (i.e. Small business using spreadsheet(s) to track customers – move to a database backed CRM; custom or SaaS)
4. Prioritize Initiatives:
Rank and prioritize technology initiatives based on their impact on business goals, urgency, and feasibility. Again, keeping in mind short- and long-term initiatives and the impact to the technical resources (labor as well as infrastructure) available.
Use techniques like the MoSCoW method (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have) to categorize priorities. If you are not familiar with this prioritization methodology, it is as simple as it sounds: Any technology or functionality that is deemed "Must Have" is therefore critical to reaching the desired goal/objective and "must" be included in the plan moving forward. From there, "Should and Could have" become lesser priorities and can most likely be implemented at a later date.
5. Define Milestones:
Break down each initiative into smaller milestones or phases. Each milestone should have clear objectives and deliverables. By getting more granular in your planning, it is much easier to account for the "realities" of implementing each initiative.
Example: if you are implementing new functionality in a custom/in-house developed application, break that functionality into as many small pieces as possible – at all architecture levels (front end, backend, data, etc.)
