Road Map: The Business Applications Playbook discusses the importance of application change, how the change should be influenced by technological innovation and takes your enterprise step-by-step through the process of creating a Business Applications Road Map. The road map is intended to help application development and delivery professionals sustain a viable set of business applications. A road map is not only going to help enterprises stabilize costs and leverage new technologies but will also adapt to the changing needs of the business and support the revenue for customer life cycles.

As business applications battle the digital age, the major issues are rising costs, overbearing workloads, constantly evolving technology and shifting business requirements. To prepare your enterprise for success, correlate your Applications Road Map with what Forrester recognizes as the five key technology trends: cloud/Software as a Service (SaaS), user experience, flexibility for change, embedded analytics and integration.

Access Application Portfolios and Processes

In the beginning stage of the road map process, businesses should assess application portfolios and processes. Gaps and deficiencies in the current environment should be identified at this stage, as well as processes and applications that should be retained. Key tasks here are reviewing business technology strategies, assessment of the current application and technology environment, assessment of business process capabilities and requirements moving into the future and gap determination.

Set Strategy and Vision

Moving on, the second stage allows your enterprise to set the strategy and vision that will drive your application environment. Incorporate creative investigation of what is possible into this breakdown. Evaluate new technologies such as mobile, big data and social collaboration that can be brought to the table. Base your strategy/vision in the fundamental requirements of what the firm must do judging from the competitive environment, regulatory mandates and customer-centric strategies. Key tasks in this stage are: articulation of the vision for business processes, defining the technology innovation strategy to support the process vision, defining the scope and objectives of the strategy and development of a preliminary business case for the transformation.

Define the Target Architecture

Stage three of Forrester’s Business Application Road Map Approach is to define the target architecture. Elaborate on the functional, technical, integration and information delivery elements of your enterprise’s road map in a manner designed for communication to the world of business. Key tasks at this stage of development are: define the functional architecture, identify technology characteristics and deployment methods, determine how current applications fit into future plans, map integration and data management strategies, define business intelligence (BI) strategies and performance measures and define the Business Technology (BT) organizational model.

Define Delivery Roadmap

In the fourth and final stage of building a business application road map, you are now ready to define this delivery road map, based on sequencing priorities, dependencies and sources for acquiring the technology. The business application road map document is built on the components defined in prior phases: defining phasing priorities, assessment of buy versus building alternatives, determination of candidate software suppliers, analyzing project dependencies and time frames, definition of the business application strategy road maps and perpetual re-evaluation of the plan.

“The business application road map effort is an opportunity to lead change in business for disruptive and incremental transformation scenarios.” To gauge the level of transformation required in building your application road map, consider the following factors: the pace of business evolution, technology obsolescence risks, technology innovation, flexibility requirements across diverse business needs and user engagement.

Read the complete report here. Hear more about how your organization can adapt to the changing needs for the digital age at COLLABORATE 18, April 22 – 26, 2018. Register before March 8 to save up to 40 percent. Stay up to date with the latest conference news by following @QuestUserGroup on Twitter and look for the official COLLABORATE 18 hashtag, #C18LV!