Whatever happened to the three-year IT roadmap?

CIOs now lean on shorter-term, more flexible plans, saying there’s too many unknowns to plot IT strategies years ahead. Credit: Shutterstock / Rawpixel.com Like many execs, Erica Hausheer has had plenty of experience using three-year roadmaps to guide projects and conversations about planned work. “It was one of my tools in my toolkit,” she says. But the value of long-term roadmaps has dwindled to the point where Hausheer, senior vice president and CIO of Teradata, now uses a different, shorter-term plan to steer her and her team. “We identify what specific things we’re going to do at a program level and how we’re going to go after those in a 12- to 18-month plan, and that plan needs to have some flexibility built in,” she explains. “It’s more about our annual portfolio. And beyond [that timeframe], it’s more at a strategy level, knowing that what and how I’ll deliver is going to change.” For decades, organizations and their executive teams looked years ahead. They crafted five-year business plans and three-year roadmaps to provide their organizations with not only a destination to reach but the directions to get there. CIOs used that approach, too, developing three-year roadmaps to keep their […]

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