What is a technology roadmap?
Technology roadmaps set out the “why,” “what”, and “when” of a firm’s technological evolution, creating a clear schedule for the future.
A technology roadmap is a schedule that shows how a business’s information technology or software will evolve in the future to support its core products and operations. Most roadmaps outline the following:
- Why the business needs new technology
- What new technology the firm needs to implement
- When the new technology should be ready
Hence, a technology roadmap should have a rationale, timetable, and detailed description of the form that it should take.
On a basic level, roadmaps are critical for ensuring that the necessary work gets done. They tell team members precisely what to expect and what order they should do things in.
Technology roadmaps show firms the technology currently available to them. (In some cases, executives and business departments don’t have full knowledge of their resources). Schedules detail when the firm implemented current systems and when it plans to retire them. They also include end-of-life information because it enables the company to plan its finances more effectively.
In most firms, engineers or operational teams develop the technology roadmap, not the executive. However, in smaller companies, the CEO, CFO and others may play a role.
A detailed breakdown of the components of a technology roadmap
The above discussion is quite general. In this section, we explore the elements of a technology roadmap in more detail.
- Objectives: Objectives are what you want upcoming technology to help your organisation achieve, and should be measurable. Common objectives include things like improving automation or reducing operating costs.
- Releases and schedules: Releases and schedules tell members of your organisation what changes to expect and when. For instance, it’s a good idea to send out warning emails before making UI updates.
- Status: The roadmap’s status tells people where you are now at a glance. For instance, you might be in the middle of a major update, meaning all systems are offline.
- Features: Roadmaps should also detail the individual features that you will add once you finish the project. Operators and engineers can then refer to this while completing work.
- Initiatives: Initiatives are the big themes of your technology roadmap. For example, migrating systems onto a new platform could be an initiative, as could decommissioning old equipment.
Our Chatbot Technology Roadmap
At Click4Assistance, we have ample experience with technology roadmaps. In fact, we’ve been using one for our chatbot technology, something we envision as the future of customer service.
Over the years, we’ve developed our bots significantly. At first, they only gave pre-programmed answers. But today, they have natural language processing which allows them to answer questions, even if clients pose them in non-standard formats.
Going forwards, our technology roadmap for our chatbots will focus on two things:
- Improving their natural communication style
- Implementing them across more platforms
Improvements in communication style will occur as the underlying natural language processing system improves. Progress will depend on increasing data volumes.
Better chatbot integration into website formats will depend more on internal resources: that is, how many members of our team we can dedicate to making our chatbots work. It will also depend on platforms’ willingness to permit vendor apps.
