Roadmapping and Roadmaps: Definition and Underpinning Concepts

Abstract

Roadmapping emerged from industry and has evolved over the decades, through improvements and refinements made by both practitioners and research groups, to become an established and extensively deployed method. Roadmaps are popular in helping to convey and communicate the essence of strategic plans, organizational initiatives, program pathways and future courses of action. But what actually constitutes a roadmap? What are the unique attributes that distinguish them from other journey-mapping approaches and forward-looking business documents? Drawing upon active involvement in industrial engagements, applied research, tool development, and supported by the literature, a roadmap has now been defined as: a structured visual chronology of strategic intent. Further, roadmapping has been defined as: the application of a temporal-spatial structured strategic lens. As a result of these more rigorous and robust expressions, this paper reports and reviews their underpinning concepts and dimensions, and puts them forward as the new standard definitions.

Roadmapping in the Digital Transformation Literature

“…Product-Technology [24,25,27,38,41,52] An approach to support alignment between product and technology planning in an environment with continuous maturation of digital technologies Strategy [11,16,29,36] An approach to support strategic plans, actions, and alignment across different contexts and organizations in an environment with increased collaboration Business [15,22,46] An approach to changing business models to support new value-creation paths as a mandate for survival Data [20,26,32,43] An approach to support exploitation of data for competitive advantage in an environment with increasing volume, heterogeneity, and speed of data Design [1,30,31,42] An approach to support changing customer perspectives, needs and wants address roadmapping associated with aspects of digital transformation (see Table 1). We will review digital transformation literature to improve our understanding of how roadmapping is used to reimagine organizations.…”

“…Since roadmapping emerged from industrial practice more than five decades ago, it has been adopted in a range of sectors to address many different strategic goals and organizational contexts [11,28,29]. The broad adoption of roadmapping practices emphasizes its flexibility and multi-dimensional reach, suggesting that there is no single roadmap that will be optimal for all organizations [11,28].…”

“…What the organizations have in common is the need to plan and determine the way forward for their digital transformation. According to the literature, organizations tend to deploy roadmapping when challenged by complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity [29].…”

The systems approach of strategic roadmapping: Framing challenges and contributions whilst flexing to changing conditions and circumstances

“…Strategic roadmapping provides a powerful and practical means of supporting organizations with their strategy development and long‐term planning (Kerr & Phaal, 2022). It enables the elicitation of an organization's strategic intentions/commitments and delivery of purposeful outcomes, along with the pertinent interrelationships between demand/pull and push/supply‐side factors.…”

“…These examples cover a range of different industries against a variety of organizational contexts and situations, with the dominant task typically being to depict how technological innovations could be integrated into future products and capabilities that would satisfy the needs of potential customers and generate value for the business. Admittedly, such examples do collectively appear confined to technology‐intensive sectors where the method has, historically, gained in prominence as an effective way of aligning investments in technology to competitive advantage and corresponding commercial expectations (Kerr & Phaal, 2022). However, strategic roadmapping is generally applicable and customizable to businesses of all kinds.…”