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A technology roadmap is a flexible planning schedule to support strategic and long-range planning, by matching short-term and long-term goals with specific technology solutions. [1] [2] It is a plan that applies to a new product or process and may include using technology forecasting or technology scouting to identify suitable emerging technologies. [3] It is a known technique to help manage the fuzzy front-end of innovation. [4] It is also expected that roadmapping techniques may help companies to survive in turbulent environments [1] and help them to plan in a more holistic way to include non-financial goals and drive towards a more sustainable development. [5] Here roadmaps can be combined with other corporate foresight methods to facilitate systemic change. [6]
Developing a roadmap has three major uses. [3] It helps reach a consensus about a set of needs and the technologies required to satisfy those needs, it provides a mechanism to help forecast technology developments, and it provides a framework to help plan and coordinate technology developments. [7] It may also be used as an analysis tool to map the development and emergence from new industries.
The technology roadmapping process may be conducted in three phases: preliminary activities, the development of the roadmap, and the follow-up activities phase. Because the process is too big for one model, the phases are modeled separately. In the models no different roles are made; this is because everything is done by the participants as a group. [8]
The first phase, the preliminary phase (see figure 2), consists of three steps:
In this phase the key decision makers must identify that they have a problem and that technology roadmapping can help them in solving the problem.
In this step it must become clear what the conditions are (they must be identified) and if they are not met, who takes actions to meet them. These conditions include, for example:
All conditions should be satisfied (or an agreed-on party takes necessary actions) to continue to the next step. The participants can have zero or more conditions of their own. It applies to all conditions that have the attribute to be met or not.
Committed leadership is needed because of the time and effort involved in creating a technology roadmap. Additionally the leadership should come from one of the participants, one of them provides leadership and sponsorship. This means that the line organization must drive the process and use the roadmap to make resource allocation decisions. [9]
In this step the context for the roadmap is specified. In the company a vision should exist and it must be clear that the roadmap can support that vision. If the vision does not exist one should be developed and clearly stated. When that is done the boundaries and the scope of the roadmap should be specified. Furthermore, the planning horizon and the level of details should be set. The scope can be further divided into the technology scope and the participation scope.
In table 1 all the different sub-activities of the preliminary activity phase can be seen. All the sub-activities have concepts as end products (marked in bold). These concepts are the actual meta-data model, which is an adjusted class diagram. [10]
Activity | Sub-Activity | Description |
---|---|---|
Satisfy essential conditions | Identify essential conditions | When all the participants come together, essential conditions can be identified (e.g. what groups should be involved, what are the key customers and what are the key suppliers). |
Take action to satisfy conditions | For technology roadmapping to succeed, conditions from the participants must be satisfied. | |
Provide leadership / sponsorship | The part of leadership / sponsorship should be taken by line organization; they must drive the roadmapping process and use the roadmap to make resource allocation decisions. | |
Define the scope and boundaries for the technology roadmap | Clearly state vision | The already existing vision must be clear. |
Develop vision | The vision is developed and stated clearly. | |
Define scope | The scope of the project can further define the set of needs, planning horizon and level of detail. The scope can be further divided into the technology scope and the participation scope. | |
Define boundaries | The boundaries should also be included. |
The second phase, the development of the technology roadmap phase (see figure 3.), consists of 7 steps:
1. Identify the "product" that is the focus of the roadmap,
2. Identify the critical system requirements and their targets,
3. Specify the major technology areas,
4. Specify the technology drivers and their targets,
5. Identify technology alternatives and their timelines,
6. Recommend the technology alternatives that should be pursued, and7. create the technology roadmap report.
— Defense Logistics Agency, [11]
In this step the common product needs are identified and are agreed on by all the participants. This is important to get the acceptance of all groups for the process. In case of uncertainty of the product needs scenario-based planning can be used to determine the common product needs. In figure 3, the participants and possibly the scenario-based planning provide the common product needs.
Once it is decided what must be roadmapped, the critical system requirements can be identified; they provide the overall framework for the technology roadmap. The requirements can have targets (as an attribute in figure 3) like reliability and costs.
These are the areas that help achieve critical system requirements. For each technology area several technologies can be found. Example technology areas are: market assessment, crosscutting technology, component development, and system development.
In this step the critical system requirements from the second step are transformed into technology drivers (with targets) for the specific technology area. These drivers are the critical variables that select the technology alternatives. Drivers depend on the technology areas but they relate to how the technology addresses the critical system requirements.
At this point the technology drivers and their targets are specified and the technology alternatives that can satisfy those targets should be specified. For each of the alternatives a timeline should be estimated for how it will mature with respect to the technology driver targets.
The time factor can be adapted suitable for the particular situation. The time horizons for e-commerce and software related sectors are usually short. Other distinctions can be made on scale and intervals.
Because the alternatives may differ in costs, timeline, etc., a selection must be made of the alternatives. These are the alternatives to pursue in figure 3. In this step a lot of trade-offs must be made between different alternatives for different targets: for example, performance over costs and even target over target.
At this point the technology roadmap is finished. In figure 3, it can be seen that the technology roadmap report consists of 5 parts:
The report can also include additional information. In table 2 all the different sub-activities of the development phase can be seen.
Activity | Sub-Activity | Description |
---|---|---|
Identify the "product" the roadmap focuses on | Identify needs | This critical step is to get the participants to identify and agree on the common product needs. This is important to get their acceptance. |
Use Scenario-based planning | If there is major uncertainty about the common product needs, then scenario-based planning can be used. Each scenario must be reasonable, internally consistent and comparable with the other scenarios. | |
State needs | These are the needs for the product. | |
Identify the critical system requirements and their targets | Define critical system requirements | The critical system requirements provide the overall framework for the roadmap and are high-level dimensions the technologies relate to. These include things like reliability and costs. |
Define targets | For each of the system requirements targets must be defined. | |
Specify the major technology areas | Transform requirements into technology oriented drivers | The major technology areas should be specified to help achieve the critical system requirements for the product. The critical system requirements are then transformed into technology drivers for the specific technology areas. |
Specify the technology drivers and their targets | Select technology alternatives with their targets | Technology drivers and their targets are set based on the critical system requirement targets. It specifies how viable technology alternatives must be to perform by a certain date. From the available technology alternatives a selection must be made. |
Identify technology alternatives and their timelines | Identify alternatives and their timelines | The technology alternatives that can satisfy the targets must be identified. Next to this the timeline from each alternative must be identified. |
Recommend the technology alternatives that should be pursued | Select subset of technology alternatives must pursued | Determine which technology alternative to pursue and when to shift to a different technology. Consolidate the best information and develop consensus from many experts. |
Create the technology roadmap report | Create the report | Here the actual technology roadmap report is created. This report includes: identification and description of the technology, critical factors, unaddressed areas, and implementation recommendations and technical recommendations. |
This is the moment when the roadmap must be critiqued, validated and hopefully accepted by the group involved in any implementation. This requires a plan developed using the technology roadmap. Next, there must be a periodical review and update point, because needs from the participants and the technologies evolve.
Given the potential complexity and organisational inertia surrounding the creation of roadmaps, researchers at the University of Cambridge [12] focused on developing a fast-start approach to roadmapping. [13] This approach, called T-Plan, was created in the late 1990s primarily to help organisations take the first step into roadmapping with minimal resource and time commitment. It has been influential in the propagation and uptake of roadmapping internationally including translations of the T-Plan workbook [14] into Chinese (traditional & modern), German, Japanese and Spanish. The approach (as well as its counterpart for innovation and strategy roadmapping, S-Plan) is flexible and scalable, and therefore can be easily customised for efficient application. [15] Fast and lean approaches are particularly important for small and medium enterprises (SME) and have been shown to work in particularly to give directions to clusters of SMEs. [16]
The process of technology roadmapping fits into corporate strategy, corporate strategic planning, technology planning and the business development context. Three critical elements should be connected: needs, products, and technology.
Creating a technology roadmap requires certain knowledge and skills. Some of the participants must know the purpose of technology roadmapping. Next to this group-process and interpersonal skills are required since the process includes a lot of discussions and finding out what the common need is. If the number of participants is really large there might be need for a consultant or facilitator.
This is the most common type of a technology roadmap: linking the insertion of technologies into products.
This type is more directed to the implementation of strategy and related to project planning. Figure 5 shows the relationships between technology development phases, programme phases and milestones.
Documented case studies include:
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives.
In business and engineering, product development or new product development covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product and introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale. The products developed by an organisation provide the means for it to generate income. For many technology-intensive firms their approach is based on exploiting technological innovation in a rapidly changing market.
A marketing plan is a strategy or outline created to accomplish a marketing team's objectives. A marketing plan is often created together by marketing managers, product marketing managers, product managers, and sales teams. A marketing plan falls under the umbrella of the overall business plan.
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements.
In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.
Scenario planning, scenario thinking, scenario analysis, scenario prediction and the scenario method all describe a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.
The Information Services Procurement Library (ISPL) is a best practice library for the management of Information Technology related acquisition processes. It helps both the customer and supplier organization to achieve the desired quality using the corresponded amount of time and money by providing methods and best practices for risk management, contract management, and planning. ISPL focuses on the relationship between the customer and supplier organization: It helps constructing the request for proposal, it helps constructing the contract and delivery plan according to the project situation and risks, and it helps monitoring the delivery phase. ISPL is a unique Information Technology method because where most other Information Technology methods and frameworks focus on development, ISPL focuses purely on the procurement of information services. The target audience for ISPL consists of procurement managers, acquisition managers, programme managers, contract managers, facilities managers, service level managers, and project managers in the IT area. Because of ISPL's focus on procurement it is very suitable to be used with ITIL and PRINCE2.
A business analyst (BA) is a person who processes, interprets and documents business processes, products, services and software through analysis of data. The role of a business analyst is to ensure business efficiency increases through their knowledge of both IT and business function.
Target costing is an approach to determine a product's life-cycle cost which should be sufficient to develop specified functionality and quality, while ensuring its desired profit. It involves setting a target cost by subtracting a desired profit margin from a competitive market price. A target cost is the maximum amount of cost that can be incurred on a product, however, the firm can still earn the required profit margin from that product at a particular selling price. Target costing decomposes the target cost from product level to component level. Through this decomposition, target costing spreads the competitive pressure faced by the company to product's designers and suppliers. Target costing consists of cost planning in the design phase of production as well as cost control throughout the resulting product life cycle. The cardinal rule of target costing is to never exceed the target cost. However, the focus of target costing is not to minimize costs, but to achieve a desired level of cost reduction determined by the target costing process.
Business analysis is a professional discipline focused on identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions may include a software-systems development component, process improvements, or organizational changes, and may involve extensive analysis, strategic planning and policy development. A person dedicated to carrying out these tasks within an organization is called a business analyst or BA.
Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model is a process reference model developed and endorsed by the Supply Chain Council as the cross-industry, standard diagnostic tool for supply chain management. The SCOR model describes the business activities associated with satisfying a customer's demand, which include plan, source, make, deliver, return and enable. Use of the model includes analyzing the current state of a company's processes and goals, quantifying operational performance, and comparing company performance to benchmark data. SCOR has developed a set of metrics for supply chain performance, and Supply Chain Council members have formed industry groups to collect best practices information that companies can use to elevate their supply chain models.
Technology Intelligence (TI) is an activity that enables companies to identify the technological opportunities and threats that could affect the future growth and survival of their business. It aims to capture and disseminate the technological information needed for strategic planning and decision making. As technology life cycles shorten and business become more globalized having effective TI capabilities is becoming increasingly important.
Treasury Enterprise Architecture Framework (TEAF) was an enterprise architecture framework for treasury, based on the Zachman Framework. It was developed by the US Department of the Treasury and published in July 2000. May 2012 this framework has been subsumed by evolving Federal Enterprise Architecture Policy as documented in "The Common Approach to Federal Enterprise Architecture".
A phase-gate process is a project management technique in which an initiative or project is divided into distinct stages or phases, separated by decision points.
Technology scouting is an element of technology management in which
Human resource planning is a process that identifies current and future human resources needs for an organization to achieve its goals. Human resource planning should serve as a link between human resource management and the overall strategic plan of an organization. Ageing workers population in most western countries and growing demands for qualified workers in developing economies have underscored the importance of effective human resource planning.
SAP implementation refers to the name of the German company SAP SE, and is the whole of processes that defines a method to implement the SAP ERP enterprise resource planning software in an organization. The SAP implementation method described in this entry is a generic method and not a specific implementation method as such. It is based on best practices and case studies from various literature sources and presents a collection of processes and products that make up a complete implementation method to allow any organization to plan and execute the implementation of SAP software.
Target operating model is a description of the desired state of the operating model of an organisation. When working on the operating model, it is normal to define the "as is" model and the "to be" model. The target operating model is the "to be" model. It is possible to produce a target operating model for a business or a function within a business or a government department or a charity.
Product strategy defines the high-level plan for developing and marketing a product, how the product supports the business strategy and goals, and is brought to life through product roadmaps. A product strategy describes a vision of the future with this product, the ideal customer profile and market to serve, go-to-market and positioning (marketing), thematic areas of investment, and measures of success. A product strategy sets the direction for new product development. Companies utilize the product strategy in strategic planning and marketing to set the direction of the company's activities. The product strategy is composed of a variety of sequential processes in order for the vision to be effectively achieved. The strategy must be clear in terms of the target customer and market of the product in order to plan the roadmap needed to achieve strategic goals and give customers better value.