Evolution of Roadmapping at Motorola

From drawing roadmaps on large sheets of paper, the company has moved to creating them by completing an interview on-line at one's own workstation. One way we can serve our customers better is by assuring that all associates, employees and partners have access to the same information when making business decisions. This is the focus of the Enterprise Roadmap Management System (ERMS), an effort sponsored by Motorola's Chief Technology Office and the Innovation Leadership Team, made up of senior technology representatives from across the company. ERMS provides a common roadmapping process, a common software solution, and a common information architecture for all of Motorola. This gives Motorola associates the ability to create, build and share their technology visions, products, and business strategy roadmaps throughout the corporation. Years ago, Motorola CEO Robert Galvin stated, "The fundamental purpose of the Technology Reviews and the Technology Roadmaps is to assure that we put in motion today what is necessary in order to have the right technology, processes, components, and experience in place to meet the future needs for products and services." (1) ERMS has taken Calvin's vision of roadmapping and infused it into the Motorola culture. Motorola presents roadmaps as snapshots in time during the annual corporate technology reviews and as the main focal point in the continuous process of reviewing what may happen in the future. Collaborative Roadmaps An important aspect of the company's strategic planning process is gathering and sharing information globally with respect to customer, supplier and competitive intelligence. ERMS has created a common roadmap library for the simple purpose of sharing collaborative roadmaps. These roadmaps include the necessary customer and supplier information as well as competitive intelligence; they capture the whole business environment surrounding an organization's strategies. The ERMS team is building a strong internal and external library of roadmaps. Included in this library are roadmaps from the various internal organizations as well as industry associations, customers, suppliers, and competitors. This roadmap library allows Motorola associates, managers and strategists to: * Create relationships between their own roadmap and a roadmap of interest. * Perform gap analysis between roadmaps. * Improve functional linkage and trend analysis. * Generate representational composites of strategies. * Determine prioritization and level of competitor investments in specific areas. * Monitor industry trends. * Assess technology requirements. * Identify challenges facing Motorola businesses. The practice of building collaborative roadmaps also allows Motorola to identify significant market changes while identifying misalignments between significant strategies. These roadmaps also help prevent executives from being blindsided by disruptive technologies that are emerging quickly and sometimes quietly. The solution of improving the functional linkages and trend analyses has given managers the ability to promote fresh insights about strategic issues and encourage external experts as well as other associates to contribute to their strategies. By leveraging this potential strategic intelligence, management can now "know more than they thought they knew." Having all these roadmaps in a common repository has given Motorola the ability to form stronger business alignments. It puts the company in a position to provide a system of checks and balances that will reduce misjudgments and market "surprises" through a linkage of technology plans to business strategies and product plans. It is obvious that roadmap collaboration provides a greater potential for communicating information, analyzing data to a greater depth and formulating more precise business decisions. Analyzing customer roadmaps allows an organization to determine how certain changes in a customer's business model will impact its own vision. …