Roadmapping technique for service management

Roadmap and roadmapping techniques, especially technology roadmapping, become increasingly popular in future planning for organizations. The major benefits from the approach are multiple participation, collective learning and "alive" process, through which, involved parties and persons can communicate, debate, negotiate and compromise on something for achieving a purposeful and worth-of-common-efforts goal. For the success of the approach in the activities involving multiple parties and stakeholders, proper methodologies, methods, tools, mechanisms are definitely needed. In this paper, we introduce general roadmapping techniques into service management, especially in the area of emerging service for the purpose of planning and management; at the same time, we bring a series of powerful approaches developed in systems science and knowledge management in the roadmapping process. The purpose of the latter approach is to deal with the potentially conflicting views on future plan due to different beliefs, values, and perspectives. It is not intended to blur the differences of diverse opinions; but it is seeking for exploring the appropriate system to critically and creatively leverages the varieties and brings forth new ideas that are absolutely indispensable for creating future roadmaps. The knowledge-creating perspective developed in JAIST is used in the roadmapping process for exploring the conversions of tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge between individuals and across groups, organizations and inter-organizations. Through SECI model and organizational knowledge spiral, as well as the cultivation of agreeable environments, roadmappers could choose to use "rich picture", "T-Plan" [8], "QFD", selected systems methods and other tools to create a roadmap and improve the quality of roadmap in those area involving multiple parties, with a diversity of perspectives, and full of complexity and changes.