The Strength of Initiative Roadmaps in Enterprise Architecture

Initiative Roadmaps, or Investment Roadmaps as sometimes referred to, are a widely adopted process within Enterprise Architecture to proactively manage a portfolio of initiatives or ideas. Before any approval, these initiatives undergo evaluation, impact assessment, and value assessment. Such evaluation and qualification are typically led by the enterprise architects. ?

They typically start as ideas, then transitions into initiatives, often in a more or less structured process. Within Next-Insight, we have the options to suggest a digital workflow, that enable an idea to transition into initiative and delivery. For each of these items or initiatives, they will vary in time and outcome. The purpose of the Initiative Roadmap Process is to provide a structured approach to align any idea to its overall strategic support. Hence, a predefined set of roadmap views typically supports the process.

Investment Roadmaps serve as a proactive approach to address both current and future deliveries within the investment portfolio. The purpose of these roadmaps is to ensure alignment and a communicative approach to future development. This involves converting strategic goals or long-term objectives into “items” on roadmaps that address the value and timeline of investments over time and from various perspectives.

Key objectives of Investment Roadmaps include:

1. Converting strategic goals into roadmaps that address the value and timeline of investments.
2. Providing a realistic view of sequencing—what comes first, later, and much later—in an overall time scale.
3. Focusing initially on outcome and value before evaluating business case and cost.
4. Understanding the impact on the business before committing any cost.

These perspectives enable discussions and alignment of investment portfolios for sprint-based delivery against a series of roadmaps.

Roadmaps may be structured around other architectural artefacts such as strategic goals, development teams, product areas, etc., and typically relate to many architectural artefacts such as related applications, processes, segments, and products. Hence, the roadmaps take the shape of targeted outcomes mapped against an indicative timeline with all of the initiatives (aka investment items), and if provided by Next-Insight, you can drill directly into the architecture.

While this may initially seem like a daunting task, akin to a Gantt chart, the key is not to delve into detailed plans for the enterprise architects, but to stay at the outcome-focused perspective to ensure the overall alignment with the vision, principles and strategic ambition. This is exactly what is provided with the out-of-the-box configuration of Next-Insight.

Investment Roadmaps serve to convert strategies and future into visual representations, allowing people in your organization to comprehend the big picture that Enterprise Architecture is supposed to provide, but at the same time aligning allocations and investments buckets to balance the long-term strategies.

Unlike a classical Gantt chart that focuses on implementing project activities along a timeline, the purpose of Investment Roadmaps is to address "outcome" or "strategic goals" on the secondary axis. The items on the roadmap can be viewed as plateaus representing the modernization or transformation the organization will undergo.

Over the past decade, roadmaps have become the Rosetta stone for converging strategic objectives into overall planning. While not overly focused on detailed timelines, they emphasize overall dependencies, value contributions, and a big-picture perspective to overall planning. For higher capability levels, maintaining digital roadmaps is certainly feasible.

Plans provided within a project or by a product team should align with the roadmap as an integrated part of enterprise architecture also to support agile development and speed considerations.

?While we offer consultation and advice to start working with roadmaps and strategic planning, we can also accelerate the digital roadmaps by use of?Next-Insight — the #1 innovative EA Management portal. Leverage this low-code technology to propel your Business Architecture and Enterprise Architecture forward. Next-Insight stands as a premier choice, offering a comprehensive tool for visualizing and analysing value roadmaps, capabilities, and investment views.

For #1 low-code SaaS to EA Management, visit?https://www.next-insight.com

For advice to get started, let’s talk,?https://www.next-insight.com/free-demo/

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