How do you get started?
We’ve talked about a strategic IT roadmap and stressed the importance of standards and best practices. Now, we’re going to get more specific and offer a step-by-step guide on how your business can develop your own strategic IT roadmap. The following six steps can help your business create your own strategic IT roadmap.
Step 1: Develop a detailed business plan
You can’t plan how to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are going. The first step toward a strategic IT roadmap is figuring out what you want to accomplish as a business. How big are you going to grow? How many employees will you have? What lines of business will you to offer? How many locations will you have? Ultimately, you need to determine what success looks like for your business in the next one to three years. That vision of success is the ultimate destination for the GPS (the roadmap from our first blog this quarter). With your business’ objectives in mind, you can figure out how to align your technology to achieve these goals.
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Step 2: Establish Standards and Best Practices
The next part of IT roadmap development is determining the set of IT standards and regulations you will abide by and the IT best practices you will utilize to achieve those standards. Many small and medium-sized businesses don’t have adequate internal IT resources or the bandwidth for this exercise. Consulting a partner or provider that has built a set of standards over the course of several years and is well-versed in compliance and standards for different industries can save money in the long run and ensure your business is meeting its industry and regulatory obligations.
Step 3: Perform a gap analysis
After you have determined your business plan, standards, and best practices, the next step is to perform a gap analysis to identify where to invest. Do you have the technology in place to achieve your goals and meet your standards? What about security—is your data safe? The gap analysis helps you pinpoint technology gaps, determine areas where your technology is not aligned with your plans and goals, and establish where investment is needed to help you achieve your vision of success.
Step 4: Prioritize and budget
Once you have identified your technology needs, the next step is to prioritize and create a budget. Important questions to ask include:
- What can your business spend now?
- How much is each of these initiatives going to cost?
- What should you prioritize first?
- How many man hours of time will these initiatives require?
- Do you need a new product, service, or vendor relationship that you don’t have currently?
- Are there parts of your current infrastructure that no longer make sense because they don’t help your business achieve its goals?
Few organizations can create a roadmap and tackle all of their identified needs at once. In the prioritization step, your business can prioritize and schedule what makes sense for your needs and budget. You identify where are you most vulnerable, which businesses initiatives are most important, and determine what investments give you the biggest bang for your buck and schedule those items first. You rank your priorities and then start to schedule those by quarter.
Step 5: Perform continuous assessment
The strategic IT roadmap is not a static document—it should be assessed quarterly and changed, if necessary, in response to changing priorities, market conditions, and other factors. Continuous assessment helps ensure that your business’ current direction is still the right one. Perhaps there is a supply chain issue that has altered your business plans. Or there is a global pandemic that keeps employees at home, and you need to invest in collaboration software instead. The quarterly assessment helps keep you accountable to the plan, ensures you are completing your goals, and allows for course corrections where necessary.
Step 6: Enlist help if you need it
If reading the previous five steps has left you anxious and thinking that you don’t have the right resources in-house to develop a strategic IT roadmap on your own, help is available. Find an IT partner with experience in developing strategic IT roadmaps and with expertise in standards and best practices, budgeting, and prioritization. Make sure your partner is committed to getting to know your business and environment, understands your market, and provides dedicated resources to help you achieve your goals in a proactive, rather than reactive, way. An experienced provider will have developed a process-driven, strategic methodology to help you create your strategic IT roadmap. As a result, you’ll receive a roadmap that is aligned with your business needs, goals, and plans and a corresponding budget so you can plan your IT spending.
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At Logic Speak, our core values shape how we lead, how we work, and how we serve our clients. They’re not words on a wall, they’re filters for decisions and expectations for how we show up every day.
But here’s something we’ve learned the hard way: even good values have a shadow side.
Values, when taken too far or applied without self‑awareness, can create unintended consequences. What starts as a strength can quietly become a blind spot. And if we’re not careful, the very things we pride ourselves on can work against us.
So today, we want to talk honestly about our values, not just the best of them, but the risks of overusing them.
We Care for You
The strength:
Caring for others is foundational to who we are. It means treating people with dignity, empathy, and kindness. It means remembering that coworkers, clients, and partners are humans first, not just roles or tickets or invoices.
The shadow side:
When care goes unchecked, it can turn into avoidance. We may hesitate to give hard feedback because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. We may tolerate behaviors longer than we should because we empathize deeply with circumstances. Over time, clarity suffers, and ironically, so does trust.
Care without courage isn’t actually care.
We Lean In
The strength:
We lean in when there’s a need. We take ownership. We step up when things are unclear or uncomfortable. This value fuels responsibility, initiative, and teamwork.
The shadow side:
Leaning in too much can become overfunctioning. We jump in to fix things that aren’t ours to fix. We take on too much instead of letting others wrestle and grow. Eventually, this can lead to burnout, resentment, or invisible bottlenecks where “that person always handles it.”
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is not lean in, but step back.
We Love Our Craft
The strength:
We take pride in doing things well. We pay attention to details. We care about quality, process, and doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
The shadow side:
At its extreme, loving our craft can turn into perfectionism. We may over‑engineer solutions, delay decisions, or become critical when others don’t meet our internal standards. What was meant to produce excellence can unintentionally slow momentum or make collaboration harder.
Excellence should serve the outcome, not replace it.
We Keep Improving
The strength:
Growth matters here. We believe learning never stops and that feedback, when handled well, is a gift. This value keeps us curious, hungry, and moving forward.
The shadow side:
Constant improvement can quietly create the feeling that “where we are is never enough.” Wins may go uncelebrated because we’re already focused on what’s next. People may feel like they’re always being evaluated instead of occasionally being affirmed.
Improvement without appreciation can feel exhausting.
Why This Matters: Blind Spots Are Part of Being Human
None of these shadow sides mean our values are flawed. They mean we’re human.
Every person, every team, and every organization has blind spots. Often, they’re not found in our weaknesses, but in our strengths, overused or unexamined. The danger isn’t having blind spots, it’s assuming we don’t.
That’s why self‑awareness matters so deeply to us. It’s why feedback matters. It’s why we believe asking questions like “How is this landing?” and “What might I be missing?” is a leadership responsibility, not a sign of insecurity.
Living Our Values With Humility
Our goal isn’t to live our values perfectly. It’s to live them thoughtfully.
That means holding our values firmly, but ourselves humbly. It means inviting perspective, welcoming challenge, and remembering that good intentions don’t eliminate unintended impact.
When we name the shadow side, we don’t weaken our culture, we strengthen it.
Because the best teams aren’t made of people without blind spots.
They’re made of people willing to look for them.
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