Strategic Application Roadmapping

Business strategy drives initiatives, which drive multiple projects into the IT pipeline. Each project competes for resources, and depends on new and existing infrastructure.

Strategic Application Roadmapping is the discipline of coupling strategy to specific sequences of projects, organized to arrive at a larger goal – a sum greater than the parts. It involves analysis, planning and governance to identify a mixture of applications supporting specific strategic goals and specific business processes. This entails understanding multiple, complex factors: the function, cost, value and time dependencies in the current and planned application portfolio.

Some of the critical questions that SIBRIDGE helps answer include:

• What is the set of business critical applications and what functions does each support?
• What business function overlap exists across these applications?
• What technologies (strong, weak, expensive, affordable) are leveraged and to what extent?
• How tolerant are the applications to load, changes, problems with other systems, etc.?
• How costly are the applications to operate and change?
• What is the state of the company’s data assets?
• What are the metrics and measures that the business and IT use to gauge effectiveness and/or improvement?

SIBRIDGE tackles the application roadmapping problem directly, using an approach with five primary phases:

• Capture Business Objective and Priorities
• Assess Current State
• Establish Decision and Governance Mechanisms
• Develop Target State
• Develop Roadmap To Target State
• Implement , Manage and Refine

The end result is a multi-year application roadmap that serves as a compass for strategic application development, creating an increasingly effective and efficient set of applications that support the business. Efficiency ultimately enables consolidation and reduction in size of the application portfolio, reduction in the replication of business data into application silos, reduction in integration complexity, and thereby, ultimately, a reduction in development and operating expenses.

SIBRIDGE consultants bring rigor and discipline into the arena of defining and implementing governance and SDLC processes that support strategic application roadmapping, using best practices, tools and techniques to bring rigor and accountability, without introducing unnecessary delays or bottlenecks to the process.