Keeping up-to-date with software development is essential for every architect. Every year more new platforms, languages, frameworks, tools, and techniques emerge. It can be overwhelming to keep track and evaluate all dimensions of these technologies. Ignoring them altogether is not an option because you have to prioritize technology investments and leverage them to improve development processes and even cut operational costs. In this article, I will describe a tool that you can use to keep up with these technology trends and show how you could build one for your company using the Communities of Practice (CoP) approach.

Technology radar is an excellent tool that provides an early warning system for technologies on the horizon, giving your architecture group time to craft a strategic response. You either put up defences by saying no to some of them or launch an attack by leveraging them and extracting business values. Nicholas D. Evans further describes the radar analogy in his book — Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology.

Driving Innovation

By visualizing the host of technologies you use along with the emerging technologies that will bring disruption to your organization, you can competently discuss it with your company leaders and the architecture group.

Unbiased Decision Making

The absence of a technology radar leaves your architecture group in the dark with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It is worse when people start creating an environment of personality-driven investment decisions. By creating a technology radar, you intentionally perform unbiased research on emerging technologies and trends through a gap-analysis method.

In an earlier blog post, I describe how an Architecture CoP enables organizations to connect people, share knowledge, and foster individuals. One characteristic of the CoP is an environment ready for cross-fertilizing ideas and increasing opportunities for innovation. So instead of building the technology radar with a silo mentality, members of your CoP get together to discuss the emerging technology. They start by filling out a worksheet for the technology that interests them, discuss each technology item on the whiteboard, and then proceed to create the radar.

Filling out the Technology Worksheet

This worksheet provides an initial assessment of its strengths, risks, and use cases. It is kept as a living document because the CoP reviews it regularly to validate or disprove their evaluations.

Using a Whiteboard for Discussion

After filling out the worksheet for each technology, members of the CoP then put the names on the whiteboard or a digital board such as Google Drawing.

Creating the Technology Radar

ThoughtWorks provides detailed instructions on the mechanics and shows you how to facilitate the discussion before making a recommendation for each technology. After reviewing the worksheets and debating on each item on the board, the group is then ready to build the radar.

By making the radar accessible for everyone in your organization, you provide people with a clear understanding of the technology and encourage them to think of the opportunities and risks that each brings. It also provides a mechanism for passionate technologists to suggest or defer an idea via the radar building process. Thus, the debate on the radar can sometimes be more valuable than the visualization itself.

If you are interested in trying out the radar tool, feel free to make a copy of this Google Sheet for the Technology Worksheet and this Google Drawing for the Technology Whiteboard. You can then follow the instructions from ThoughtWorks to build the radar.

Business Innovation and Disruptive Technology

This book describes the radar analogy in greater details and shows you how to use the technology radar to create a strategic roadmap.

Technology Radar - Latest Edition

ThoughtWorks has a global technology advisory board which meets regularly to share their thoughts on Techniques, Tools, Platforms, and Languages & Frameworks. If you want to stay on top of the technology and trends, this document is a must read.

Build Your Own Technology Radar and its Youtube video

Neal Ford describes the mechanics of building the technology radar for your company. If you are interested in developing a personal technology radar, I recommend watching his video.

Zalando's Tech Radar: All you need to know

Zalando builds the technology radar via their Zalando Technologist Guild, i.e. a CoP. They use a different breakdown for the quadrants: Frameworks, Data Management, Infrastructure, and Languages. They define what each ring means for their company.

Tech Radar at Wayfair

Wayfair makes their technology radar available to the public. They also define their breakdown for the quadrants and what each rings means for their company.

Building An Emerging Technologies Radar

Gartner provides a comprehensive toolkit for building an emerging technologies radar. I suggest starting with the ThoughtWorks radar and then evolving it later.

Birth of the Technology Radar

This article talks about how Darren Smith brought up the radar metaphor at ThoughtWorks.

How We Create the Technology Radar

Camilla at ThoughtWorks talked about her experience in a four-day tech radar meeting with her colleagues from across the globe.

A Library for Generating An Interactive Radar

If you are interested in hosting your radar internally, consider using this open-source library.

Zalando Tech Radar Library

Another open source library for building your radar.