Why Network Automation Roadmaps Fail (& How to Get It Right)

One aspect of my job that I love is getting to see the vision and roadmap for our customers as they get underway on the network automation journey.

It’s fascinating to me to see how similar concepts manifest across a wide variety of industries and domains, skewed here and there by the requirements specific to the customers’ businesses. These can be so valuable. If there is one thing that this role has taught me, it is the art of curating a roadmap that can translate the business outcomes all the way down to the team-based tactical goals, down even further to the lower-level platform dependencies.

But when done wrong, roadmaps don’t provide the structure you need.

Roadmaps are one of those things that can either be a static quasi-motivational wiki page (far too high-level), a granular to-do list (too in the weeds, can lose sight of goals), or even a useless piece of paper that everyone ignores.

But the right roadmap, driven by business goals and connecting tactical and strategic commitments, will ensure every group is aligned and keep the project moving forward — critical for successfully automating today’s complex, multi-domain networks.

Business outcomes that are driving business value are articulated and easily tracked to the tactical outcomes documented in the roadmap.

Building a roadmap that drives automation success requires alignment between every group involved — from leadership and business initiatives to each individual domain team. Too often, automation efforts stall out because each domain team has different expectations and goals. If both the technology and the organizational approach to automation support cross-domain collaboration without demanding each domain team change tooling or workflows, then automation can deliver the ROI companies expect.

For a deep dive on aligning automation projects with business initiatives, take a look at this guide.

We’ve all seen roadmaps that are either too high-level without real commitments, or too low-level. When the roadmap does not depict exactly how the business outcomes will be delivered through the tactical work of the team(s), it is not effective and each individual is left to decipher what they think will help achieve that goal. Fragmented effort with differing perspectives on how to achieve the goal is an incredibly ineffective way to transform a business.

Objectives Without Metrics

At some point you’ve probably seen a roadmap that has a number of nice platitudes, but the ability to measure those platitudes to indicate if you are closer or further from success is impossible (“Be Thought Leaders for the Organization” for example). While these may be principles that a team hopes to embody, they are not measurable goals. It’s key that metrics be defined that directly correlate with achievement of the goal.

Roadmap Is Too Tactical & Doesn’t Connect with Executive Directives

The inverse of the 10,000 feet roadmap is one that is tactical and outlines exactly what will be accomplished over the period of time, but does not represent how these goals will meaningfully drive value within the business. You can have the most efficient and skilled team steadily accomplishing all the goals they set out for the year, but if they do not align with executive directives and contribute towards transforming the business, they will not receive the support required and will likely not see the same momentum as a group that is working alongside multiple teams towards a common goal.

1: Identify the Critical Dependencies that will Enable Success

We do an exercise with our strategic customers that starts with identifying the business outcomes that align with executive directives, outline the key results that will help measure success of the directives and then the products and services that help achieve the metrics and, lastly, maps the dependencies that will be required to achieve the products/services. It takes the high-level outcomes and maps the critical path to achieve success and bridges the gap between the executive directives down to the tactical success criteria of the teams with boots on the ground. It serves as the translation tool for all parties to mutually agree on what value realization looks like for the organization as a whole as well as the teams contributing to its objectives.

2: Metrics Matter

We have all fallen into the trap of a riveting conversation spawned by a new year, a new beginning, in which all of us feel confident we understand what success looks like at the beginning of the year, but after 6 months in the trenches, the vision of success is pretty murky. It is incredibly important to identify the metrics that are going to be the rock that keeps everyone centered around how we are measuring success. While it can be an intimidating exercise to put a number on a goal, the good news is they are not a life sentence. Metrics can shift and adjust as you understand that some are a higher priority (i.e. have a higher impact on achieving objectives) or require a change based on external factors.

3: Value Realization Is Key

Hand in hand with metrics is measuring value delivered to the organization by achieving the roadmap objectives. Ideally the activities identified on the roadmap are driven by data indicating the value (sometimes items on the roadmap are a priority because someone says it’s a priority, such is life). The data may indicate a change on the network that occurs at a high-frequency and requires multiple engineers be present. In other cases the data could indicate that an outage costs the business hundreds of thousands of dollars due to bad config on a device.

Once value has been clearly defined and how it will be realized overtime through the outcomes of the roadmap, part of the effort should mandate the measurement and tracking of that value. For example, if an orchestration is pushed to production and it has been established that each execution saves the organization $750k, it should be tracked and published in a way that constantly demonstrates the value realized to the organization. Internal marketing of a team’s accomplishments is an understated and under-practiced skill that can make an incredible impact on the team’s executive support.

Here are the most common roadmap initiatives I see at our customers:

Data Strategy

You might hear folks evangelize that a pristine source of truth is critical to the success of automation programs. At Itential, we think that the key to a successful data strategy is orchestration that can pull from multiple data sources (aka a ‘source of trust‘ approach). There are very few organizations that have the luxury of fixing the data in all of their sources of truth before beginning their digital transformation (I know you’re all shocked).

When customers are defining their roadmaps, they see orchestration as the key driver to ensuring consistency in updating data during deployment as well as driving audits towards data integrity.

Tooling Consolidation

A lot has changed in the network technology space over the years; the market has evolved substantially and there are tools that served a purpose for a moment in time, but have not aged well. They rely on people to log into GUIs, to evaluate data. They were not developed with modern networking constructs around automation and orchestration in mind and as a result, organizations have to reconcile if these systems have a place in their network. This has driven many organizations to take a keen eye towards consolidation of tooling and clearly understand what functional requirements these systems held (if those same requirements are even still necessary/relevant), if they can be satisfied in another system, and then identify what needs to be kept and what should be purged from the network. The roadmaps we see include building out the functionality of the systems that will be removed from the network with an automation-first mindset.

Reduce Time to Delivery

More and more customers are considering what the user experience is like for the consumer of the network. Early automation efforts (before a unified strategy is in place) are usually driven by individuals within domains. As a result, the outcomes of those efforts are also limited to that domain. By tying together multiple domains with an orchestration strategy that allows everyone to build automation and contribute to one workflow, teams can accelerate critical network and IT services from request to fulfillment. The right roadmap will provide the direction and framework for teams to work together and succeed.

An effective network automation roadmap is more than just a strategic document. If it’s built correctly, bridging the gap between high-level goals and the work teams do every day, it’s a way to ensure alignment across the organization, turning automation efforts directly into measurable impact.

For network and IT leaders, the takeaway is clear: prioritize alignment, define clear metrics, and continually track value realization. When your roadmap is able to connect cross-domain initiatives and adapt to evolving priorities, your automation efforts will transform from a collection of siloed projects into a unified strategy that delivers success.