Technology management via a set of dynamically linked roadmaps

The three fundamental types of information/knowledge needed to support a best-in-class technology management capability are: (1) the business, marketing and customer requirements driving your business; (2) the decision planning needed to frame the strategic direction of your company; and (3) the roadmaps that identify the decision alternatives (business scenarios) over time. Today, most companies are focusing on one or two of these essential ingredients, leaving a major gap in their ability to understand how change will impact their business in what is now an explosive period of technological and sociological change. They need to better leverage their strategic knowledge in order to dramatically improve their technology management capability. However, this knowledge is either missing, localized to a few experts, hidden in documents, or is untrustworthy since it is out of date, of questionable quality or has no clear accountable source. This paper describes work that Motorola Labs is pioneering in providing an integrated, strategic decision-making, requirements management and roadmapping process. To make this process realizable within a large enterprise, a set of methods and tools have been developed to support the process. While this paper focuses on technology management, this approach can and is being applied across other processes such as strategy development, research management, system architecture and platform development as well as market and product planning.