It’s one thing to look at your business and develop a strategy, but what technologies are required to underpin this effort and in what order should you invest?
Technology leaders want to be increasingly strategic; they have visions of technologies to push the business strategy forward and they want an IT roadmap to show the order in which they should invest.
Cisco engages with your CIO and Lines of Business leaders, helping them on their strategic IT planning process by using our unique business and IT architecture alignment methodology known as Strategic Digital Roadmap (SDR). A workshop is organised whereby Cisco will:
- Understand a refined view of the strategic priorities
- Capture key stakeholder viewpoints and drive an inclusive process of business requirements capture
- Establish the detailed business objectives behind a strategic priority
- Identify the key drivers, capabilities and outcomes for each imperative so that a high level strategic roadmap can be delivered
This leads to the next stage of what is a structured customer engagement methodology, the process being outlined below:
Once the business priorities and their associated drivers have been identified, and agreed with the company representatives, Cisco will analyse IT capabilities that will directly benefit the company. This is informed through an understanding of existing and new desired capabilities, together with existing IT Programmes and priorities. We would expect to identify four business priorities and use them as the core of the work, an example of which is below:
The SDR engagement shows how a strategic investment in IT can drive strong business outcomes. Our commitment, though, is to understand and address your business strategies, not merely to sell technology. IT solutions are grouped to show how they will impact the business:
- Foundational
- Solutions needed to provide a reliable foundation upon which to build business applications and services
- Enabling
- Solutions which enable business priorities or higher-level solutions
- Impacting
- Highest impact to the business priorities – potentially transformational / absolutely essential for the business
Once the solutions are graded, a Business Impact Matrix is drawn up which determines the complexity of each solution against the business impact. This analysis is used to show which solutions should be investigated first as they will facilitate other solutions. It is also important to look at the existing capabilities in order to see how close the solutions are to being delivered if already in progress.
The ultimate deliverable of our engagement is a multi-year Strategic Digital Roadmap addressing current and future state capabilities and solutions to solve your key business challenges.
This roadmap shows how technology will support the business strategy and help drive businesses priorities over the near and longer term future. The roadmap is used to illustrate the improvements that can be made by IT, having been generated jointly by the business leaders. It will help management understand how to balance investment and project priorities.
For the best results, the line of business leaders need to fully participate in this development of the roadmap. With leadership buy-in, and by taking an architecture approach with Cisco, you can transform IT into a powerful business enabler with our Strategic Digital Roadmap service.
Authors
