Planning Roadmap Digitalization Project Explainer

**PLANNING THE ROADMAP FOR A DIGITALIZATION PROJECT** Welcome to chapter four! Road trip time! In our last chapter we went from "business processes" to "optimized business processes" to "figuring out all the cool hardware, software, data, and job skills we need to carry OUT these new business proce...

**PLANNING THE ROADMAP FOR A DIGITALIZATION PROJECT** Welcome to chapter four! Road trip time! In our last chapter we went from "business processes" to "optimized business processes" to "figuring out all the cool hardware, software, data, and job skills we need to carry OUT these new business processes". Now we need to talk about how to turn our new Enterprise Information System -- because that's what all these things ultimately ARE - into a reality. Luckily, there's a pretty standard flow for this. A Digitalization Project begins with something we've already done: identifying what an organization NEEDS in its new Enterprise Information. This is normally split up into two phases: the "Planning" phase, where the focus is on the 'Big Picture' of what the new system needs to do in order to support your mission, business model, and strategic goals. And then the "Requirements Analysis" phase, which is a far more detailed version of the "planning" phase. Here, we leave the bird's eye perspective and swoop down into the nitty gritty details of what your new Information System needs to do on a technical level. Examples of things you'd decide here are "How much data does our system need to handle per second?", "what should the user interface be able to do?", "how often do work stations in Norway and South Africa communicate with each other per hour?", and so on. So it's STILL about mapping out what you need the new System to do. But it's far more detailed. The next phase is called "System Design". Here is where the \"blueprint\" of your new Enterprise Information System is made. The output is a detailed plan for how your system will be built. What will the database design look like? What software architecture are you going to use? What will the network infrastructure look like? What will the user interface look like? This blueprint is critical for the next phase, which is called either "Implementation" or "Development". Because based on the blueprint, programmers and developers BUILD the new Information System. You buy new hardware and software. Programmers code or customize software. They build databases. They create user interfaces. Network technicians install the new network And there's lots and lots of testing and debugging of the individual components. This testing continues in the next phase, which is appropriately CALLED the "testing" phase. The difference to the previous types of testing is that we're not just checking whether Information Systems work INDIVIDUALLY: instead, we're testing how they work in combination with each other. Does the new system function correctly? Is it reliable? Does it meet all the requirements you specified during the "Requirements Analysis" phase? Do all the elements integrate with each other? AND -- super, super important: how do the users of the new system react to it? Does the new system meet their needs? Once the "Testing" phase has been completed, it's time for "Deployment": This is when the new Information System is fully installed and put into operation. In case of a big change, you probably won't make a radical cut from "old" to "new" at once. There will usually be a transition period where the old system is slowly phased out, where your users receive training, and where you migrate all the data from the old system into the new system. After Deployment, many projects enter the completion phase. But some organizations prefer to include one more phase, the "Maintenance" phase. This is basically just a time period in which your organization lives with the "new normal" and looks out for integration glitches, software bugs, and new feature requests that are impossible to spot without actually USING the new system for a while. So there you have it! Those are the standard phases of a digitalization project, and for the rest of this chapter, we're going to look at how to fill each of these phases with life.