Technology Roadmapping Update

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 The information in that description is a few years out of date now, but the message is still a good one.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.