Strategic roadmapping

How to use strategic roadmapping

The issue of technology management is becoming increasingly important and critical in delivering competitive advantage to companies. The effective management of technology requires appropriate methods or systems such as a strategic roadmapping, which can support the development and implementation of integrated strategic business, product and technology plans.

The management of technology is becoming increasingly important in today global competitive environment (Gaynor, 1996). According to the European Institute of Technology and Innovation Management, technology management addresses the effective identification, selection, acquisition, development, exploitation and protection of technologies (product, process and infrastructural) needed to achieve, maintain [and grow] a market position and business performance in accordance with the company’s objectives (EITM). This definition highlights the importance of establishing linkages between commercial and technological functions in order to achieve the business objectives. This requires effective knowledge management and supported by appropriate management tools or processes (Gaynor, 1996). However, there is lack of effective processes to technology management. Consequently many technological investment projects, such as on robotics, computer integrated manufacturing, and flexible manufacturing systems had failed (Gregory, 1995). The failure is not due to the technologies itself, but because the links between technology and strategy to satisfy the business needs were not well understood (Gregory, 1995). As a result, companies today are aware of the importance of technology strategy and concern about how to deploy and manage technology to support the goals of the business. Clearly, there is a need to understand the potential of existing and new technologies, integrate and exploit them to provide new capabilities, products and process in the context of business and corporate strategy (Roussel et al., 1991). Furthermore in a fast changing technological age, the frequent interaction between users, manufacturers and scientists to provide innovative capabilities is getting important. Periodical technological review may be changing from annual to day-to-day basis. Companies’ managers need to build-in the technology management process into their daily operating system and routine in order to ensure critical changes are closely monitored. In order to do that, there is an increasing industrial focus on management tools or methods that can satisfy the above needs (Phaal et al., 2004). An important aspect of such a method is that it encourages collective discussion among managers from different functional departments such as commercial and technology, and linkages between technology resources and company objectives. A strategic roadmapping is an example of such a method that can be used for exploring and communicating the linkages between technological resources, company products, and business requirement.

Characteristics of strategic roadmapping

Technology roadmap process is a powerful method for supporting technology management and planning. It has been widely used in industry (Barker and Smith, 1995) but consists of various types of format. For example a roadmap may appear in the forms of multiple layers, bars, texts, time, pictorial representations, flow charts, or arrows (see figure 1). A roadmap may not appear in the form as shown in figure 1 but may contain many different kinds of combination (of these formats) to suit a particular business situation. The diverse ways of roadmap construction may be due to a lack of clear and accepted standards or guidelines for managers (Phaal et al., 2004). Nevertheless a few organisations have successfully developed an effective roadmaps, such as Motorola’s technology roadmap (Willyard and McClees, 1987) and Cambridge’s technology roadmap (TRM). The purposes and architectures of these roadmaps are discussed in the following paragraphs.

Issues and challenges of using strategic roadmapping

Based on a survey in various industries, a few implementation issues were reviewed and analysed. These can be summarised in the following points:

1. Many companies had stopped using the process after having tried it for just once, and the reasons are not well understood.

2. It is difficult to keep the record up-to-date on an ongoing basis.

3. It is difficult at the initial start-up stage of the process.

4. It is difficult to build a comprehensive and robust roadmap.

5. There are too many alternative roadmap formats available, the selection criteria are not well understood and the used of tacit knowledge in selection is more preferred over codified knowledge causing difficulty in understanding how one format is better over another.

6. The process was facilitated by experienced and well trained academics from the university. Industrial managers who participated in the research had not initially equipped with the relevant process knowledge, and thus a knowledge gap exist which caused misinterpretation and confusion.

7. In addition to the 6 above, there is lack of formal education procedures in the process as a result the managers took time to grasp the fundamental concepts of new knowledge.

In general, key benefits of strategic roadmapping are the sharing of knowledge and the development of a common vision of where the company is going. These benefits can hardly be obtained by the TRM process that facilitated by a prescript and ‘hard’ approach, i.e. T-plan alone. The process needs to be integrated with the ‘soft’ aspects of management such as human resource management issues. Among the issues identified in this text are the top-level managers’ involvement and support, multi-disciplinary and -management layers team building step, training, and post-process arrangement. However, the existing TRM process has been successfully tested in a number of industries and poses some useful experiences and a few important features. Thus, grounded on the existing TRM process, I suggest a new method that incorporating the ‘soft’ aspect of human resource management into the process to make it a better approach. The new method is renamed as Technology Roadmap Management (TRM-II).