Our IT Road Map

We publish a monthly IT road map. It highlights upcoming changes to our infrastructure or systems, and more importantly, new value we are going to be delivering to the business, and when to expect these things. Here's is a page to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I have been surprised at the response. We publish this via Salesforce Chatter, our internal social media platform, and it goes to all employees. This level of transparency has helped us prioritize, and keeps everyone plugged in to what we are doing. Publishing via Chatter gives the employees an easy way to give us feedback; just reply to the post, and gives us an easy way to track who is looking at it.

It has also helped us be a bit more realistic about what we are going to do. If we haven't done at least basic scoping or allocated resources, it probably doesn't belong on the road map. Setting a date to something that is just a dream at this point just sets false expectations, and leads to us disappointing the business.

We are going to add a "Futures" section that will be a place for us to list the things we are thinking about to give a sense of our IT vision.

In short, keeping the business in the loop with IT initiatives helps keep them in line with the needs of the business, which is a good thing.