Every one has one question in mind when they ask me about the OpenText acquisition of ECD (Documentum). What about the roadmap?
It is the wrong question.
Our entire industry is addicted to selling the roadmap. Here is something you won’t hear anywhere else. You can’t actually buy one.
No one ever reads the lawyer slide. It is always the second or third slide in a deck and has a lot of words. When you put it in Google translate here is what it really says.
“Roadmaps are guaranteed to change as soon as you disconnect from the webex.”
This is true both before and after any acquisition. I hesitate to make absolute statements but this observation is about as close as you are ever going to get. Roadmaps change.
More often than not when people ask this question what they really want to know is how does it affect me? Personally. Is my pet project at risk. Is all that time I spent in training now useless. What about all those product specific linkedin contacts that I hoped to ping when I start my own consulting firm. My system, my department, my budget, and the most important of all – my career.
That is entirely fair but only tangentially related to a roadmap conversation focused on platforms and point releases. The marketing term for this concern is “investment.” A concept that goes way beyond simple capital to include things like organizational structure, headcount, political and market risk. The roadmap question too often encourages you to focus on the past, thinking about what you have already done and defending it while only pretending to talk about the future.
Protecting what you have already done only gets you what you already have. Call it innovators dilemma if you like but when looking at it in product evolutionary terms I call it the parity pitfall. More on that in a later post.
The right thing to ask is “how can you the vendor better solve this new problem I have right now?” You need to ask how an acquisition makes it easier for a vendor to do more for you starting today. Not in six quarters. What is in the toolbox that wasn’t there before and how do I use it to evolve?
This is the far more productive, relevant and less speculative conversation.
A roadmap conversation can tell you one thing. It is the clearest indication that a given company understands the business they are in. Even when the eventual path to get to “there” bears no resemblance to the timeline they showed you. That understanding is more rare than you might think.
The specifics do not matter as much as the trajectory. Do the roadmaps represent a continued focus on past success? Or do they acknowledge the changes in the technical landscape that, no matter how painful, you need to accept and plan for?
A true roadmap conversation should make you challenge your own structure as much as it does that of the vendor. When done right these are honest business conversations that affect both parties and are not just the product management equivalent of a weather report. The assurance you need should not come from a denial of change but rather an embracing of it and a commitment to go through it together.
Lee Dallas
Marko Sillanpää
That translation is awesome…recognize that anything further than 90 days out in a roadmap will change, markets, requirements, and customer demand changes. Probably the best thing to take away from a roadmap presentation is confidence your vendor has a vision for where they are going. Did the roadmap present a vision of where they want to get to, incorporating where the industry, and your company, is going? Or was it just a dump of upcoming features they’ll add over the next 12 months?
You and I have discussed this recently. It’s the difference between vision and sight. Vision sees through fog. I’m not referring to the vendor’s vision, but prophetic vision – the people who sense and express THE change that is coming.
Roadmaps address sight, tactics at least, and perhaps short term strategy. Vision anticipates the earthquake; it knows it is coming. The prophet is able to see it, pre-visualize it, and express it in images and analogy, but also in seemingly ridiculous terms that we do not understand. Recall there is a very fine line between vision and hallucination. But when it finally gets here, it’s everything the prophets said, but different than what we expected.
Right now, business needs credible technology prophets, who can take the disparate, detectable quantum of change and create both a unified theory and application of it.
With all due respect, and no offense intended, at this point in history, we need another Sir Isaac Newton more than we need another John Newton. Business desperately needs vision more than a description of up and coming point releases.
I sense an earthquake that will make ECM as we currently think of it or imagine it irrelevant, but I am not a Newton of vision or sight.
Pick me! I have a “…unified theory and application of a detectable quantum change.” It starts by putting Information at the bottom of *everything*… See: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finding-universals-enterprise-information-management-john-o-gorman then email me if you agree this approach has legs.
John O’