Today, we are wrapping up our blog series "Digital Strategy Roadmaps: A Step-by-Step Approach to Success" with Simone Abel. In the final post of the series, Simone talks about why you should get a digital strategy roadmap, and how it can increase your ROI.
Why Bother?
A digital strategy roadmap is a cohesive planning document that joins digital transformation projects and initiatives to short and long-term goals pragmatically.
Digital strategy roadmaps benefit your organization because they:
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Help communicate a digital transformation product or service strategy that supports a set of business and end-user objectives
- Clarify differences between current and future state
- Establish a high-level order of execution, priority, and sequence with a potential timeline to undertake the work
- Provide a way to achieve executive buy-in on technology projects before a line of code is written or software is purchased
Together, these combined benefits reduce digital project risk and increase ROI.
Digital strategy roadmapping is all about proper planning, and mitigating risk against bad (rushed) technology decisions. It's also about getting buy-in from executive stakeholders and ensuring there is alignment to broader organizational strategic goals and plans. Who benefits ultimately? Your end-users - whether they be your staff or customers - and the business itself - through increased operational efficiency and/or data optimization.
Final Thoughts
The roadmap is the outcome of a vital planning exercise that helps key stakeholders in your business understand what the existing process, systems and services are, what the future could be, and how to get there.
A digital strategy roadmap, combined with research, visualizations and performance goals, is a powerful way to tell the story of digital transformation. Beyond keeping everyone in the team aligned, the vision-objective keeps different teams with competing agendas moving in the same direction.
Given how quickly the needs of your customers and business will change, it is important to revisit your digital strategy roadmap continuously. In future articles, we plan to share more on related topics such as:
- The Discovery Process
- Audits & Expert Reviews
- Gathering Objectives
- Prioritization Methods
- Technology Procurement
- Continuous Improvement / Optimization
Happy Roadmapping!
BLOG SERIES
This post is a part of our four-part blog series called "Digital Strategy Roadmaps: A Step-by-Step Approach to Success" with Director of Digital Strategy at Enginess, Simone Abel.
Digital Strategy Roadmaps: A Step-by-Step Approach to Success
Part 1: Foundations
Part 2: Five Key Stages in Building a Digital Strategy Roadmap
Part 3: End Deliverable
Part 4: Why Bother?
