Building a technology platform in practice

At Livingbridge, we believe tech-enabled businesses will secure ever-greater competitive advantage in the future. Our technology enablement team has worked with many of our investees to empower them to make the most of that opportunity.

Since investing in this online ferry ticket aggregator, Direct Ferries, in 2016, we have worked with the business to redevelop its technology infrastructure underpinning its e-commerce systems. This project has enabled their technology team to iterate their proposition faster, critical in the competitive online travel space, and launch more effective AB testing. This has resulted in Direct Ferries significantly improving its conversion rate, both increasing customer acquisition and supporting the efficiency of its marketing spend.

The technology enablement team also worked with the email signature software provider Exclaimer, guiding them through the process selecting a new CRM system, working with the sales to team to implement it and maximising the impact of the tool across functions. The platform has given Exclaimer much greater visibility of its customers and its market, especially supporting its work with partners, allowing better visibility over its pipeline. The last two years has seen Exclaimer win a series of awards for its growth and its performance in export markets.

Elsewhere, we’ve also worked closely with Stowe Family Law, where we invested in 2017, to build a technology platform that allows it to scale. In this case, we helped the business implement tools such as data dashboards that give its lawyers a much better view of customer conversion rates and the impact these have on revenues. The company’s growth has since accelerated, with its lawyers now able to engage much more effectively with the sales process.

These aren’t isolated examples. Our experience, gleaned from the investments we’ve made in great companies over more than 20 years, is that a business’s technology platform is now integral to everything it does. Building a technology platform fit for the future is a key step in unlocking a business’s growth potential.

How to build an IT road map

Every business should have an IT roadmap. That is, a document which sets out the main IT developments and technology initiatives planned for the next six months to three years, in terms that everyone can understand. It’s a statement of intent, clearly communicating where you will make your most significant technology investments and what the business’s priorities are.

Crucially, the IT roadmap doesn’t come from IT alone. While it makes sense for the business’s most senior IT executive to lead the process of road mapping and to control the document, developing this work should involve every business function. Best-in-class IT roadmaps are tightly aligned to the commercial imperatives of the business and set out the capabilities required to deliver its ambitions. This inevitably requires conversations with senior leaders to distil what those ambitions are.

Your IT roadmap sets out a clear plan for the business’s most important IT and technology projects over the next six months to three years. It is a strategy document that everyone in the business should be able to read and understand, not a technical piece of work.

That’s not to suggest your IT roadmap should become some sort of wish list, detailing what every executive thinks it would be nice to have. Once everyone has outlined their goals, there will inevitably be a debate about priorities. The IT roadmap is the conclusion, setting out a clear vision of where the business will invest based on a hard-headed assessment of the budget available and the capabilities most-needed.

It’s important to have a structured process for achieving that vision. How will the senior leadership team assess the proposals in the context of strategic objectives? Who will finalise and sign off the document? And how will it be shared across the wider business?

What does a great IT roadmap look like?

Brevity and simplicity are key features of best-practice IT roadmaps. You should be able to set out your plans on one or two pages. Aim for a series of headlines that spell out each initiative and when they are planned for. Explain clearly what the initiative is designed to achieve for the business – what problem it will solve – and the resources it is expected to require.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of being too technical and provide too much detail on the specifications. Clearly, IT itself will need to understand what is required to deliver each new project, but that isn’t the point of an IT roadmap. As soon as the document strays into this territory, it’s likely to lose its audience in the wider business.

Concentrate on what you want to achieve, rather than the technology that will deliver this capability. When Livingbridge moved to a cloud-based IT system, our IT roadmap set out how everyone would be able to work on any device from anywhere, rather than talking about hosted servers.

It’s also important to be realistic about timings. IT’s plans for the next six months should be tactical, based on previous IT roadmaps, but shouldn’t be on the current document. Similarly, trying to second guess what might be required much beyond three years’ time is too much like sticking a finger in the air.

How Livingbridge can help

At Livingbridge, we believe that tech-enabled businesses able to harness innovation and data are more likely to succeed. An IT roadmap is therefore crucial and we’ve invested in our in-house tech enablement team to equip our investees to deliver this.

We are able to give guidance on what the document should look like for businesses in particular given the context of its marketplace and objectives. And we can develop a best-in-class IT roadmap that empowers you to make bold decisions about where to invest.

Getting this process right can deliver dramatic results. For example, after we invested in the online heating oil retailer BoilerJuice in 2016, we helped the business plan for a transformation of its technology infrastructure. The company’s IT roadmap set out a phased approach to moving much of its infrastructure into the cloud, giving more room for scaling up the business, and to implementing new data and analytics capabilities, to generate a much better understanding of customers. In the six months after our work, BoilerJuice’s new customers increased 83% year-on-year.

Previously, we helped our investee company Encore Tickets to develop a two-year IT roadmap setting out a phased replacement of its legacy IT systems with new web-based trading and ticketing platforms, in order to help it realise its ambition to grow much more quickly online. The initiative was a major factor in driving a 150% increase in sales during the period in which we were invested in the business.

In an environment where technology is likely to be key to your competitive advantage, an IT roadmap is essential. Everyone in your business should have access to a document they can use to easily communicate the company’s priorities for investment in new capabilities. If not, now is the time to start developing it.