Build your Own Technology Roadmap!
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
3 likes•1,784 views
Whether it's for your company or your own professional development (or ideally both), everyone should have a technology roadmap. Unfortunately there is no easy path to pre-made wisdom here, but this talk opines on some ideas and approaches to help formulate a roadmap that is relevant, pragmatic and importantly, able to be communicated to others. Presented at Mastering SAP Technologies 2016
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Similar to Build your Own Technology Roadmap!
Similar to Build your Own Technology Roadmap! (20)
More from Sascha Wenninger
More from Sascha Wenninger (12)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Build your Own Technology Roadmap!
- 1. Sascha Wenninger Integration Architect, Blue T Build your own Roadmap!
- 2. • Technology Architect • Integration Focus • Co-Founder, Blue T • @sufw About Me
- 4. Focus on what’s important Core Context Generic Defines your company, makes money Never “done”, always being refined Directly supports the Core Tends to be bespoke to some extent Necessary to stay in business. Reduce costs, drive to commodity See Subdomains from Domain-Driven Design for more…
- 5. Success?
- 6. Porter’s Three Strategies… from 1980! A very high-level intro
- 7. Strategic Focus and Technology’s Role? “Gets me from A to B” Bells & Whistles Leather SeatsFabric Seats
- 8. Choose Boring Tech Image by Le Temps
- 9. I stole this idea from Dan McKinley. You should read his writing about this!
- 10. • There is a limit to how much innovation a team can swallow • Doing too many new things 😢 • Provides a budget for new things Innovation Tokens I stole this idea from Dan McKinley. You should read his writing about this!
- 11. Dogma and Rules 10% Experience 20% Pragmatism 20% Flexibility 10% Minimalism 10% Trends and Future Needs 10% Experiments & POCs 10% Hands-on Participation 10% Vendor Advice 0% The Architect’s Success Formula
- 12. Less of this…
- 13. More of that… Image by Sean McGrath
- 14. As-Is To-Be
- 18. • Shows position & movement • Priorities are evident • Flexible: Allows for revisions mid-way Vector-Based Architecture
- 20. Technology Radar Adopt Assess Trial Hold/Reduce • Published by ThoughtWorks • Free since 2010 • Covers general IT • DIY encouraged
- 21. • Does it align with our goals? • Is the benefit greater than the holistic cost? • How mature is it? • Are we mature enough to use it? • Do we think it has a future? Does anyone else? • Are we spending ? For each technology choice:
- 22. Lifecycle Phases Hold Assess Trial Adopt Don’t start using this Learn more: PoCs, conferences, etc. Try it on a suitable project No-brainer “if you’re not using this, I’ll laugh about it at the pub”
- 23. Plot Position and Course Hold Assess Trial Adopt 1 2 3 1: Web Dynpro Floorplan Manager WDA still has many uses, and FPM is the best way to build them with flexibility and consistency. 2: Enterprise Portal Effectively deprecated, with use cases being fulfilled by SharePoint, Fiori Launchpad/NWBC, and other best of breed tools 3: UI5 The framework keeps maturing, tools like WebIDE make development simpler and more consistent. SAP has proven commitment. Previously: Assess
- 24. Add Details
- 25. • A detailed radar can easily reach 50-100 items. • Be pragmatic • Focus on contentious items • Goal is to guide & start conversations Lather, Rinse, Repeat
- 26. 1. Understand what’s important 2. Understand limitations and constraints 3. Assess in context 4. Communicate! In Summary
- 28. E: sascha@BlueT.com.au M: +61 403 933 472 Me: http://about.sufw.me @sufw
Editor's Notes
- This is tricky stuff and way beyond the scope of this talk. However, if your team or even your company doesn’t have a clear view on this, how can your technology roadmap be relevant?
- Core activities demand excellence in order to deliver on the company’s strategic objectives. Finding money to invest here to build “the best solution” is rarely an issue. Generic activities are standardisable, commodity, outsourceable tasks which must be done to stay in business, but do not provide strategic advantage. This doesn’t mean they’re not important – e.g. payroll is very important to get right – but your company doesn’t beat its competitors by having a better payroll system or execution.
- Porter’s Three Strategies is sort of like corporate strategy 101 – useful at a basic level, not always enough when you get into the detail, but certainly better than not understanding who your company is or where it wants to be. But anyways, this isn’t a strategy talk, so we’ll use a simpler analogy…
- …Car Companies: Simplifying greatly, if your company was a car company, which one would it be? Obviosuly each company has a great range of models with wide appeal. But there’s a general “brand identity” you can discern, and which might reflect your company’s approach to its products and thus also technology. Even more fundamentally, is your company looking for basic luxuries like leather seats, or not? Emphatically, there’s no right or wrong answer here. But it’s important that you have *an* answer to guide your activities.
- Choose a boring technology whose advantages and disadvantages you understand very well, and build something cool with it. For example, the roof of the restaurant building in the Valencia Oceanographic Park is made from concrete – very much a boring technology that was invented over 2000 years ago by the Romans!
- Read the blog rather than my comments about it
- I forget where I found this, and couldn’t google it for an attribution. Sorry!
- While it seems alluringly simple, a trivially simplified “let’s re-implement everything” roadmap is rarely practical or sensible, nor necessarily so simple. Such a static view also offers no guidance on timing or priorities – while it shows the position now and in the future, it offers no guidance on how to get there. Also keep in mind that the future cannot be predicted. Something will inevitably happen which disrupts your well-laid plans, and cause you to change direction half-way between your as-is and to-be states, in a no-mans land in which your roadmap offers no guidance.
- But it all gets really messy, really quickly!
- A detailed radar for SAP shots can easily reach 50-100 items. Be pragmatic, and focus only on new items which are likely to generate debate or be contentious. Avoid trivialities like “use ABAP” or “use Linux for HANA” which are given for everyone.