I like how you extended this to road-mapping a future state. The one challenge with this is with the diagram in play, it’s hard to show progression over time outside of one step. The most beneficial view would likely show how multiple technologies evolve together, with milestones/critical dependencies and other parts of the business. Need to think about this more.

something that i’ve been saying of late, and probably more relevant to back-office type programmes is that technology innovation in enterprise should be mirrored by an equal change in culture and/or business processes.

If the output of a programme is a technology product/deliverable – it stands to reason that the business would need to re-engineer its culture and/or processes to maximise the impact of said deliverable.

Otherwise one is merely reskinning a proposition.

One of the challenges in my operating context is that techies are not naturally equipped to play nice in a true cross-functional teams.

In facing some of these challenges head-on I’ve been playing with a number of different tools and toys to break the executional thinking of maps.

In a ‘nudge’ manner of behavioural change I’ve started mapping current state features of an existing landscape. This seeks to apply a design lense in a manner that moves the technologist away from solving a problem using a tech-how-do-i lense to a more customer-centric propositional design lense.

I’d go as far as to question whether technologists should be defining product visions. In this instance I use the technologist as an executional delivery developer.

If we consider for a moment – that strategy provides an operating context that connects otherwise unconnected activities – we can extend this to a technology platform where a technology platform provides a technical a single operating context that connects otherwise unconnected technology estates.

A personal challenge of mine is people who sell a platform. When someone says that ‘(you/we) need a platform’ I know I’m in for a nasty debate.

One can’t just ‘prescribe’ a platform as a solution. More often people are confusing an end state technical vision with that of a platform.

IMO –

iTunes-iPhone-AppStore is a consumer platform.

Deutsche Bank Autobahn is a vertical specific platform.

Innovation, technical or otherwise, rarely takes starts with a desire for a platform, rather a platform is often where (technical) innovation lives.

I see this chapter as a fantastic opportunity for recasting the term ‘platform’ through a more academic lense in the same sense that strategy outside of the advertising world extends well beyond the narrow definitions of brand planning or brand strategy (sic).

Yes, platform is one of the most underestimated and miss understood concept. Rarely used properly.
This is going to be a tough nut to crack

I also wonder if we could reframe to include the larger question of feasibility, which is another way of defining that part of the Balanced Breakthroughs model. The tech economy drives a lot innovation today–and captures a lot of the attention in popular and business media–but there are other kinds of feasibility issues beyond apps, wifi, cloud, etc.–such as, how we think about capabilities, which domains need new functions/features to be created (vs creating experiences around them), and what kinds of predictions can be made about solutions that might come to fruition next. Again, many of these big questions are beyond the scope of an innovation primer–but following your model of how we address platform thinking, maybe there are ways to frame out the broad issues to be aware of, and rubrics by which we identify which ones to go after. That, coupled with a set of resources for further reading, might help people at least know where to get started.

Appreciate your thoughtful critique!