Technology Roadmapping Update

In a nice long post over at Accelerating Innovation, Egils Milbergs writes about the state of manufacturing in America and the promise for improvement he sees with the upcoming arrival of a new Presidential administration. Among quite a few nice points, he includes this about the potential of technology roadmapping:

Technology Roadmapping and Federal Research Priorities. Technology roadmaps represent a consensus regarding industry direction and research needs, innovation trajectories, alternative scenarios and the possibility of disruptive technologies and surprises. Industry associations and sector based collaborations are making greater use of technology roadmapping methodologies as an input to the federal R&D priority setting process as well as inputs to their own innovation planning. Roadmapping exercises can provide the basis for public and private investments in radically new production systems.

I couldn’t agree more and there can be little doubt that there’s a ton of room for improvement in way things have been done in Washington DC. In roadmapping practices, we talk all the time about the power of the process to break down silos (the barriers to communication that form in any large organization). Getting industries and the federal government to work together would be a great example of this in action.

As the author writes, one other aspect of roadmapping that needs to be emphasized is its ability to help an organization see the future with more clarity. I’ve sat in on many great workshops where a group of people who are not used to thinking out more beyond the next couple of years are asked to envision where their group should be 5 or 10 or more years from today. Once they get used to the concept, they really start to enjoy themselves. They realize they can play a critical part in defining the future of their company and that’s really powerful. Its this kind of event that is really needed today in government if we expect to stay competitive in the new world of the 21st century.

Do I believe that blog posts like this one or Egils’ will change anything? No; there are a lot of reasons for why the system works the way it does today. But there is hope as long as someone out there is pushing. Please read all of Egils’ post to see why “innovation” can be more than just this year’s enterprise buzzword.

Small Times, a magazine for micro- and nano-scale manufacturers, has this recent story about how the industry needs to do more integration and standardization. There is a lot there that would only be interesting to a nanotech researcher, but this paragraph caught my eye:

Pointing to the chip making industry as “a good model to use,” MEMS industry consultant Roger Grace declared, “We need to learn from past experiences, we have to build on what we know.” The creation and implementation of industry standards, support of R&D efforts, roadmapping, and establishment of a dedicated equipment, metrology, and packaging supplier infrastructure were among the lessons that nanomanufacturers could learn from the semiconductor community, according to Grace.

As more and more industries see the success that the semi-con guys have had with their roadmaps (www.itrs.net) you will start to see the value of roadmapping appreciated in surprising new places. Right now it’s still very much about high technology planning, but the sky is the limit really, in my opinion.

AKA: The History of Roadmapping (you might also want to read part 1)

As this page very nicely says, “Technology roadmapping, in some form or other, has been around for hundreds of years.” In other words, wherever you find a group of people trying to make sure their plans are all well-aligned, you have a roadmapping process. The information in that description is a few years out of date now, but the message is still a good one. Roadmapping is just good planning and as the history in that story is told, Motorola has been doing it longer than pretty much everyone else.

Back in the mid-1980’s Bob Galvin, then CEO, wanted to know what everyone was working on. Not in the mind-numbing detail sense, but in the high-level general sense that would give him a way to quickly determine where potential overlaps and other problems might lay. He initiated the idea that “everyone should have a roadmap” and recommended that they should all share their roadmaps with everyone else. That’s not how things worked out, but that’s OK.*

As Motorola worked out its own internal roadmapping process over the next few years, the idea started to spread to other corporations and organizations. Around the mid-90’s there was enough experience out there for the academic world to start investigating the claims of improving your product marketing results by better planning through roadmapping. Robert Phaal, Clare Farrukh and David Probert (and others at Cambridge University) wrote what are now considered the seminal papers on this subject and came up with their own universal approach, known as the T-Plan. This was the first time anyone could learn the roadmapping process in a generalized sense and apply it to their own organization.

The idea started to catch on even faster at this point and you started to see numerous organizations use the R word to describe their published plans. The most well-known now is probably the association of semi-conductor manufacturers roadmap known officially as the, International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. In each annual edition that has been released since 2000, this group of chip makers and others does its best to predict what the next 15 years will look like for their industry. There are only a few charts or graphs in the document, but there are lots of facts and figures.

This brings us to today then. The word roadmap has now taken on a much broader definition, as evidenced in its use by people such as US President George Bush (”Roadmap for Peace in the Middle East“). If you search for “technology roadmap” you will find any number of types of documents ranging from long text-based statements such as the ITRS plan mentioned above to power point presentations with vague arrows indicating plans for some undefined “future”. These are all valid roadmaps, defined to the extent that they served their purpose for their authors.

What’s important then is not the document, but the process the organization went through to create the document. If they did it right, these groups should have had any number of “Aha!” moments when marketing, product management and technology leaders put their heads together to derive these plans.

That’s it for this time. In Part three, I intend to write about what makes a good roadmapping proecss and so a good roadmap. Hopefully, these three parts will get us off on the right foot for all the more interesting discussions to come. As always, please comment on anything and everything here that strikes your fancy.

*The idea was still a good one, especially when you understand that within any large organization there is a LOT of competition. People build up “silo’s” between themselves and other departments/functions in order to protect whatever resources they have collected for their own use. More on this in the near future.

Depending on how you found this site, you may or may not be wondering what roadmapping is. Let me break it down for you. You know how whenever you’re planning to take a long trip in the car to a place you’ve never been before, you pretty much have to have a map? Without that map, you would almost certainly get lost, or at least, take a lot longer than you should to get to your destination. Now imagine how important that map would be if you were trying to find a way to get 50 teams of 50 people each to all meet up at a destination that none of them had ever been to before and the future of your company depends on the success of that operation.

Well, that’s what enterprise-scale product planning is like today and that’s why roadmapping has become an important part of many companies’ planning processes. With a carefully constructed product and technology roadmap, you can be sure that, at least as of today, you know where you’re headed and how you intend to get there. Now you may be thinking here that there are a LOT of existing processes that help manage product and technology planning such as Portfolio Management, Stage Gate, Balanced Scorecard and so on. How is roadmapping different from these other well established disciplines?

The answer is that a roadmap looks at your plans, from which markets you want to be in, and which products you will sell into those markets, down to which technologies you will be building/buying in order to offer those products — expressed on a time line. In other words, most all other well-developed planning and management processes allow you to understand how your many many products and R&D efforts compare but they ignore the element of time. Also, they tend to be focused on “what we are doing”, as opposed to “what are we going to be doing”. In other words, they focus on today, not tomorrow.

So, portfolio management software vendors claims to the contrary, most of the time, their tools are used to compare projects that you’ve already decided to fund, right? Project Management is completely operational, of course. That’s why roadmapping fills a niche that’s really not otherwise covered today. A mature, well-developed roadmapping process, with (I hate to say it but) cross-functional participation and cooperation, allows you to start planning even further out into time than you could otherwise. It gives you as firm a basis as is possible on which to start defining your future, today.

In the next installment in this series, I will talk about the history of roadmapping and how it is used today by companies like Motorola, Corning, Boeing and others. Thanks for reading this far. Please please please provide any feedback you like on where you’d like to see this conversation go next.

Lastly, if you’re a person who loves details and wants them now, you might find reading the Technology Roadmapping page at Wikipedia to your liking.

Hello world. (Sorry, just a little software geek humor there)

Welcome to the blog. My name is Peter and I am employed in the field of Technology Roadmapping. Please stay tuned here to learn more about what that is, what’s going on in the field and what’s coming up on the horizon.

Thanks for stopping by. Please feel free to comment and suggest ideas if you wish.

~Peter