Knowing where your business is going is critical to its success. Business plans act as not only a roadmap to developing an aspect of your business, they can also enable you to measure how successful you have been meeting your goals.
For CIOs tasked with moving their businesses towards more Agile working practices, creating a roadmap is even more important to ensure changes to systems and the purchase of new technologies supports the overall goal of their enterprises.
Says KPMG: “CIOs are inherently positioned to facilitate the transition to new digital business models based on Agile processes and structures and supported by digital innovation. But the reality is that many senior IT executives have difficulty working out where to begin and how to proceed. On the one hand, they can draw from a rich arsenal of Agile methods, tools and examples for software development, but on the other hand, it is not always obvious how to turn this knowledge into an actionable framework for increasing agility above and beyond application development.”
The solution to these issues is a well-defined roadmap that every aspect of your business can follow to ensure Agile processes become part of the DNA of your enterprise. When agility in business is concerned, a roadmap is vital. Every aspect of your company needs to understand how clearly stated goals are to be achieved. None more so when CIOs are considering how they will support the ambitions of their businesses to become more Agile. Business strategy today is intimately linked to the technologies a business uses.
Technology for its own sake of course won’t deliver the stated goals of a roadmap. It’s important to place the technologies in use and those intended for purchase, within the context of the overall Agile roadmap. This approach ensures that each piece of Technology supports a place on your Agile roadmap.
Deloitte defined the new approach CIOs need to take to their IT planning as: “The Agile IT planning approach starts by recognizing that speed is more important than precision and collaborative buy-in from important influencers is critical to success. This effort requires that business and IT stakeholders craft a consistent shared vision at the very beginning—a vision that everyone understands may change on the fly, if market conditions dictate. While there may be extra risk that comes with faster implementation of IT initiatives, companies that follow this path will typically realize far richer business benefits from new technology.”
Of course, any successful roadmap to deliver agility to your business needs to firstly understand where your business is now. With process assessments, CIOs can gain a deep insight into how their businesses are currently operating. This is the foundation onto which you build your roadmap, as this Information is vital to ensure decisions are based on real-world Information.
One of the fundamental components of today’s Agile business is the ability to take what have been in the past often siloed systems and integrate them together into a streamlined platform that deliver the business’s stated goals.
Your enterprise must enhance its agility to survive over the long term. CIOs have been moving forward with more integration, as the cloud has transformed many of the services they have in the past managed themselves. Looking forward, your Agile roadmap will contain even more integration and automation.
PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) in their report that looks closely at how operational excellence can be built on Agile foundations conclude: “In order to survive and thrive amid constant change, companies must reclaim the right balance of standardization and flexibility and build strategic and operational agility into their business foundations.
