An Application Roadmap provides a detailed project path with defined milestones for measuring success. First step towards building a roadmap is to understand the Corporate Initiatives, which identifies the motivation for the project investment whether it is driven by Competitive pressures or efforts undertaken for enhancing the current offering or building a completely new application. Corporate initiatives demonstrate commitment, urgency from the management and the expected time lines for the project. Based on the corporate goals Resource can be planned for Systems, Databases or Warehouse, ETL process, Application developers and users. No project can be successful unless the roadmap incorporates defined Processes for managing change, new development and working with the user community. It is important to understand the users business requirements, pains and Training needs for ensuring a user satisfaction.

A roadmap that incorporates at least Corporate Initiatives, Resource planning, Processes, Training and Documentation helps in maintaining control over the project.

Incorporating Development Standards creates consistent documents making it easy for interpreting information from data. First step towards building a development strategy is to identify source data systems and ensure standards are implemented for data transformations - ETL processes. Reports are as good as the data so defining standards and considerations for the ETL process is imperative for ensuring Data Quality. The next step is to relate the business requirements with the Meta-Layer design so that Reports and Dashboards can be designed. Reports and Dashboards must adopt standards for the Layout and Content so that there is consistency across the documents for easily interpreting information from data.

Knowing the desired deployment strategy is important from understanding various system environments such as
development, Test/QA or Staging and Production. For ensuring timely delivery at each milestone it is important to
identify the Resources for databases, system, network requirements, delays in deploying the project across various environments can reduce user satisfaction even if development team has met the required timeline.

User satisfaction is ensures that project objectives are moving in the right direction. While understanding user mind set is important for collecting requirements initially, it is also very important to empower the users with appropriate
Training, Documentation. Training and Documentation empowers the users to accept changes initiated by corporate initiatives and allows them to champion the User Acceptance Testing (UAT)