Road-mapping is an important tool for collaborative planning and coordination for corporations as well as for entire industries. It is a specific technique for technology planning, which fits within a more general set of planning activities.
A road-map is the document that is generated by the process. It identifies (for a set of product needs) the critical system requirements, the product and process performance targets, and the technology alternatives and milestones for meeting those targets. In effect, a technology road-map identifies alternate technology “roads” for meeting certain performance objectives.

Uses of the method
• Can help develop a consensus about a set of needs and the technologies required to satisfy those needs.
• Provides a mechanism to help experts forecast technology developments in targeted areas.
• Can provide a framework to help plan and coordinate technology developments both within a company or an entire industry.

Benefits
• Provides information to make better technology investment decisions.
• Determines the technology alternatives that can satisfy critical product needs.
• Helps clarify alternatives in complex situations.
• Identifies critical product needs that will drive technology selection and development decisions.
• Generate and implement a plan to develop and deploy appropriate technology alternatives.
• Complex maps can be developed that can be updated in real-time.

Disadvantages
• Resource, time and cost hungry.
• May not consider other emerging forces impinging on the road-map.
• Some of the participants must know the process of road-mapping.

Steps to complete
• Define the scope and boundaries for the road-map.
• Identify the “product” or 'issue' that will be the subject of the road-map.
• Identify the critical system requirements and their targets.
• Specify the major technology areas.
• Specify the technology drivers and their targets.
• Identify technology alternatives and their time lines.
• Recommend the technology alternatives that should be pursued.
• Create the technology road-map report.
• Critique and validate the road-map.
• Develop an implementation plan.
• Review and update.

• Determine the fixed elements (almost certain hard trends) that will inform your strategic response: slow-changing phenomena e.g. demographic shifts, constrained situations e.g. resource limits, in the pipeline e.g. aging of baby boomers, inevitable collisions e.g. climate change arguments.
• Capture critical variables i.e. uncertainties, soft trends and potential surprises. Both these and the fixeded elements will be key to creating scenarios and examining potential future paradigm shifts.
• Capture unique insight into new ways of seeing that can be utilized by the organization.
• What conclusions can we draw from the exercise(s)?
• - How might the future be different?
  - How does A affect B?
  - What is likely to remain the same or change significantly?
  - What are the likely outcomes?
  - What and who will likely shape our future?
  - Where could we be most affected by change?
  - What might we do about it?
  - What don't we know that we need to know?
  - What should we do now, today?
  - Why do we care?
  - When should we aim to meet on this?

Collaboration
This method and your response can be shared with other members or kept private using the 'Privacy' field and through the 'Tag', 'Report' and 'Forum' functionalities. Use 'Tag' and/or 'Report' to aggregate your analyzes, or add a 'Forum' to ask others where they agree/disagree and encourage them to make their own analysis from their unique vantage point.

Click the 'Invite’ tab to send invitations to other members or non-members (colleagues, external experts etc.) to ask for their input.

Do run a small test first and ensure your address list is de-duped, with no extraneous characters, mal-formed e-mail addresses etc. and that your text message is correct before sending the final version. Use the back button between the test and the live send to ensure nothing changed between both.

You can decide whether or not you want anonymous responses, but do remember that you will not be able to know who replied or said what.

The replies can be viewed and exported within the Responses tab.

You can export the responses to WebSummarizer which will give you an instant short, full and key topic split of summary responses using text analysis and allow you to display in various MindMaps. Alternatively, you can export to any of your favorite other internal or external analysis services.

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