Technology roadmaps are widely used across the Enterprise Services Center (ESC) to provide visibility into each ESC-managed application and the technologies being used to develop and maintain these applications. This visibility provides value in identifying technical debt, opportunities for innovation and improvement, and ensuring that ESC is aligned with FAA technological standards and policies. For some, technical debt is described as what occurs when a development team takes actions to expedite the delivery of functionality of a project which later needs to be changed to improve some of its interworkings. Knowing the software and which version of each application is in use also improves ESC’s security posture by identifying the product versions of each application, particularly as an application nears the end of its support lifecycle.

The ESC Enterprise Architecture (EA) team has modernized and automated ESC’s technical roadmaps. The EA Team migrated ESC’s portfolio of 76 technical and functional roadmaps from static PowerPoint documents to dynamic Tableau reports. The team manages more than 100 applications and 450 product roadmaps. This automation effort reduced the time required to create or update a single roadmap from 6.7 days to 3.6 days. The EA team is credited with creating or updating 206 technical and functional roadmaps and have added roadmaps for more than 450 products! In conjunction with the roadmap automation effort, reporting enhancements implemented include tracking technical debt for applications and product risk analysis. As the goals of the organization continue to evolve, the technological roadmaps continue to capture the organization’s alignment with its strategic goals.