Roadmaps and Roadmapping: What and Why

In a previous blog, I discussed the various barriers to innovation that you might have experienced or will experience at one time or another. Although the roadmapping process will not address cultural or organizational issues, it is a flexible approach that when combined with other strategic planning tools will help drive focus, alignment and understanding for your innovation portfolio.

A firm’s strategic intent is its vision of what is possible and what it plans to achieve in the long term. As Porter stated, essence of strategy “is not doing something better than your competitors but doing something different – choosing a unique and reliable position that is rooted in systems of activity that are difficult for others to match.”

Roadmapping provides a structured framework for exploring and defining potential paths and gaps that will aid in achieving the future state the firm desires. If the strategic vision is the general direction with a destination in mind, roadmapping is a process that aids in a step-by-step plan that shows how to get there, with the roadmap as the output. Basically, roadmapping is a strategic planning process that:

• aligns and communicates the business need: know-why;
• outlines actionable steps and interdependencies between the steps: know-what;
• drives an understanding of the alternate routes and tradeoffs to optimize resources and risks: know-how;

Roadmapping is a flexible process that integrates various views of a business (product, technology, market, capabilities, …) as a multi-layer time-based presentation. It was first used in the semiconductor industry in the 1970s to align technology, market and product directions. Today it is used quite widely in industry as it delivers many direct and indirect benefits to the organization. In summary, roadmapping and roadmaps:

• Organizes and integrates cross-functional views (market, industry, customer, R&D, …) as well as business and technical issues;
• Documents complex decisions and dependencies in an easy to digest form;
• Gives a long term direction by combining different planning horizons (product, market, technology, operations, processes, …);
• Requires multi-disciplinary, cross-functional effort which can result in better teamwork, shared ownership and communication, thereby generating alignment and engagement across sites;
• Establishes clear understanding of what needs to be done, by which order, and forces to firm to prioritize investments and make the needed tradeoffs;
• Helps identify gaps and competencies that need to be developed to be successful in the future;
• Offers an effective communication tool to be used with customers, suppliers and partners to gather reactions, and establish synergies;
• Provides continuity in strategic planning process by integrating planning and vision phases;
• Enables the firm understand and fund the capabilities and assets needed tomorrow to be successful today;

Roadmapping is an effective process that will help identify key synergies, dependencies and gaps within a strategic plan. It also aids in effective decision making and enables better communication and alignment, especially across disparate teams and organizational boundaries. This is a process where the journey, i.e. roadmapping process, is just as important as the output: roadmap.

As roadmapping is a flexible process, it comes in many different forms: market, technology, product, service, capability, science/research, product/technology, … You can represent your roadmap in whatever form best meet your needs, as long as you keep in mind to show the integration of key pieces of information in a multi-layer format with a time-line. Following Porter’s guidelines on strategy, your roadmap should answer the questions to: how your firm will compete, how your firm will deliver a unique value, and how your firm will maintain that unique position in the market.

You can get a glimpse of a firm’s roadmap, even when it is not explicit. Basically start with the firm’s vision/mission statement and strategic intent, and analyze its past and present product, service and technology offerings. This will give you a good idea where the firm is today and where it will most likely explore tomorrow. Here is a quick look at Motorola, Dell and Google, as examples.

Motorola is one of the pioneers in utilizing technology/product roadmaps. Given that, it is baffling to see how they got caught without a 3G phone, and didn’t recognize the changes in their end-customer tastes and desires. I previously blogged on Motorola’s product line, and what looks like a single minded focus on their innovations. An accurate, non-biased roadmapping process should have clearly highlighted these risks and shifts in the marketplace. However, based on a recent WSJ article (you’ll need a subscription), in-fighting might be the reason behind their problems. Motorola also indicated the challenges of achieving bottom line growth as they mainly focused on new product development, without focusing on the process or operational improvements. Again, the roadmapping process can help integrate and align market, product, technology and process activities and investments across the firm’s innovation portfolio.

Dell‘s mission “is to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve”. Their 2006 strategic corporate initiatives are: “driving Global Growth, achieving Product Leadership, enhancing the Customer Experience and developing our Winning Culture“. Given this, coupled with challenges of the direct sales model in emerging markets, it is no wonder to hear the rumors that Dell is considering channel sales. However, Dell will need to do more than just another cheaper PC, or Linux bundled laptops, or more customized/personalized color options on their systems to yet again achieve the most successful computer company in the world. What do you think will be the next business model innovation in the computer industry?

Google‘s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. With that, Google’s Office Suite (Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and now Google Presentations), and other collaborative products seems out of place, as they are about collaborative content creation. However, looking at the fact that Google is mainly known for its global presence, collaborative tools could provide the leverage Google is looking to create virtual groups, and organizing information along that vector. Although today, these tools work only online, given the growth in emerging markets, and customer desire for maintaining local data, it is quite likely to see a future architecture that would combine the local data with online content, perhaps building on top of Google Desktop. On another tangent, one of the biggest challenges for Google is the low switching costs associated with search engine. With that, integration of analytics, better and more targeted search technologies, and APIs increases the switching costs for customers, so I would expect to see more targeted and personalized search results, as well as additional products along the lines of analytics and SEO in the future. At the same time, there is a growing concern towards Google for knowing and collecting too much information about anyone and anything. Given that, what are potential products, customer services or business models Google might bring up in the future to combat that concern?

Next time, I plan to dive into building roadmaps, specifically in the context of technology/product roadmapping process.

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