Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

A different take on the technology roadmap.

This story goes back some 25 years (yes, I am that old), but it still applies. There were guys trying to do a technology roadmap that was nice and linear and just right. You know, this year we are using this technology, we will move to that technology next year, and so on until in five years we will be using the other technology.

Nice, straight timeline you could draw with a ruler.

Someone suggested take a view was that of a fishing rod. The part next to your hand is stiff while the far end is thin and flexible. You would wiggle your and and that part of the rod moved just a little. The far end would bend and flex a lot.

Liken this to a cone that is horizontal. The vertex or point is lying to the left on a time axis. The base or wide part is lying to the right on a time axis.

The tech experiments to the left (near time) are fixed. We perform those few experiments. The results could point in a few directions. As time progresses the possibilities of experiments expands. On a cone, this looks linear, but is really non-linear as the cone is a three-dimensional object.

What happens three years from now? We don’t know. There are many experiments to be performed between now and then with many different outcomes leading to many different experiments.

There are many paths between now and three, five, ten, twenty years from now.

Think back folks. The iPhone changed the world and it isn’t twenty years old. Who would have thought that we would carry supercomputers and the best cameras in the world in our pocket?

The cone expresses that well. A technology roadmap that fits in a rectangle does not.
Imagine the fishing rod. Forget the ruler. Yikes. This can be scary, but it can also be enlightening.