Technology Roadmap vs Product Roadmap

This blog is about the difference between a technology roadmap vs a product roadmap.  I have worked in the field of information technology for over 15 years and I have dealt with many technologies.  I have been also been involved in product development for many years now. When I was in the early part of my career I have discussed what is the difference between a technology roadmap vs a product roadmap. I have researched this topic and most articles out on the internet deal with this subject at a very high level and it is so abstract to follow what is really being discussed.  In this blog, I would like to present my view on what the difference is using a concrete example.

Technology Roadmap
Let us first begin with a technology roadmap.  Assume that your organization deals with its vendors using an online system that has a UI interface.  Your organization may also allow its vendors to interact using APIs or excel integration for bulk uploads.  Your organization does not currently have the capability to support EDI transactions.  Your organization may want to support EDI transactions.  The technology needed to support EDI transaction would be put on the technology roadmap.

Product Roadmap
Using the same example above, the various EDI transaction that would be supported by your organization would be put on a product roadmap.  We quickly realize that without the underlying technology to support this request, the product roadmap can only be executed once we have executed the technology roadmap.

IT Strategy

This blog will try to discuss the IT Strategy.  We will do this by answering the following questions


What is an IT Strategy? 
In order to understand what is an IT Strategy, let us look at the term IT.  IT as we all know means information technology.

Today, the term information technology has evolved so much that it mean different things to different people and organizations.

Wikipedia says "Information technology (IT) is the application of computers and telecommunications equipment to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate data,[1] often in the context of a business or other enterprise." With this definition in mind let us try to understand IT Strategy

Its all about data
IT Strategy is all about data.  Why is it all about data? Let us break the word Information Technology into Information and Technology.  Information that is presented by the data.  Technology to store, retrieve, transmit and manipulate this data as Wikipedia mentions.  What is the driver for this data?  The business of course.  The type of business determines what data is needed.  For e.g. a retail company will have data needs that is different from the data needs of a finacial company such as a bank.  There may be data that is common between to the types of business and there is data that is not.  Hence one has to look at the business needs in order to understand the data needs.  Fortunately, businesses, organizations and IT itself has become quite mature and much of the data needs is well established.  Data lies at the heart of all information technology.  Hence, for now, we will say that IT Strategy has to do with the data needed by the business.

Why do we need IT Strategy?
We all know that we need IT Strategy to support our Business Strategy.  What would happen if we do not have a good IT Strategy in place.  Suppose we want to be leading online retailer.  We would need an awesome website. We would need highly scalable backend system to grow as our assortment grows.  We would also need highly effient backend system to process the online orders and also process the financials for these orders.  An efficient system for our vendors.  A really great customer support system to support
our dear customers.  Finally, a great set of internal applications for all the wonderful analytics and reporting we would like to do.  I aplogize if I have missed many of the systems and applications.  To be a truly great online retailer all the IT systems need to interact with each other in the most efficient manner.  Also imagine the number of people working on these systems, the number of vendors supplying us with IT system and support.  If we do not put together a robust IT strategy, we will be faced with gross ineffiency, redundancy and a myriad of system issues to just name a few of the challenges.  We would soon fall behind our competition who are able to perform better due to a sound IT strategy.

When do we need an IT Strategy?
We also wonder at what point do we really need to sit down and put together an IT strategy.  I would say the day information technology become part of our business, we need to start sketching out our IT strategy.  If we let our IT grow as our IT needs grow due to growing business needs, we will soon have many disparate systems that are hardly inter-connected and working extremely inefficiently.  Hence the sooner we start the better.

Upcoming update:
How do we define a good IT Strategy?