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Development and application of technologies, which include not only new products and services, but also innovative operation and management techniques, has always been a major force in human history. The invention and use of fire, the wheel, farming tools, gunpowder, the printing press, and workforce organization and specialization are only but a few examples that have revolutionized our civilization. Advances and widespread application of medical, agricultural, military, transportation, and information technologies, as well as breakthroughs in management science concepts and methods, have exerted dominant influences on business organization, economic developments, sociopolitical movements, global ecology, and international powers. As a result, effective planning and management of technology development and application have become critically important, not just to an organization or even a country, but also to the future of mankind as a whole.

As in any decision process, the starting point of technology portfolio planning and management is the assessment of the values of the decision maker. These values are also often expressed in terms of goals and objectives for the technology portfolio decision as they represent what the decision maker would like to achieve with the portfolio.

The effectiveness of technology portfolio planning and management depends heavily on the quantity and quality of the alternatives the decision maker will consider. If either too few alternatives are considered or many alternatives are of poor quality, the decision maker will not be able to find the alternative which will provide the optimal value to portfolio planning and management, and valuable resources may be misspent sifting through the many irrelevant or inferior alternatives.

Once the decision maker has clarified and assessed the values of technology portfolio selection and identified major innovative and relevant alternatives for the portfolio, he or she needs to determine the relationships between each resource allocation alternative and its impact on the values, as well as to forecast future changes in the relationships. To meet this need, ideally a set of comprehensive business, economic, environmental, and social-political models of these relationships should be developed, for which technology is only one major factor. However, such development is well beyond the scope of this book, and we will concentrate instead on:

The analytic methods discussed in Chapter 4 are appealing in their ability to produce quantitative forecasts about technology demand growth and other relationships between technology alternatives and the decision maker’s values in the technology portfolio planning process. However, the underlying assumptions used for these methods generally require the relationships to be relatively stable, which may be invalid for the highly uncertain future business, economic, and socio-political environments of technology development and application. Thus, the accuracy of the quantitative forecasts can be questionable and the rigorous analytical effort required by these methods may not be justified. As a result, for a highly uncertain environment, a less rigorous but more insightful qualitative or semi-quantitative approach to understand future changes may be more appropriate, flexible, and effective. This chapter will present several major qualitative or semi-quantitative approaches to determining and forecasting relationships needed for technology portfolio planning.

After the decision maker has articulated and assessed the values, identified relevant technology and resource allocation alternatives, and determined the relationships between these alternatives and values in a technology portfolio planning process, he or she will need to find the best resource allocation among the technologies that maximizes the total value of the portfolio. How to efficiently search for the best choice among many alternatives is a challenge to creativity. In many cases, the effective search techniques are closely related to the characteristics of the relationship between alternatives and values, such as those of the following:

As technology development or application evolves over time and the impact on the decision maker’s values takes place in the future, the technology portfolio planning and management process is fraught with uncertainty. In Chapter 6, we have used an aggregated expected value of the uncertain outcomes as a deterministic equivalent for the relationships between alternatives and values in the process. However, the deterministic equivalent is in many situations too aggregated for proper analysis, and the uncertainty effects need to be considered in greater detail. In this chapter, we will present major methods that will assist the decision maker in finding the best technology portfolio by explicitly analyzing the effects of uncertainty.

Once the technology portfolio has been chosen, the decision maker will need to track the progress of portfolio implementation. This chapter discusses two useful tools for tracking such progress: the Project Evaluation and Review Technique and a Project Portfolio Monitoring System.

The technology portfolio planning and management process starts with the values as expounded in the organizational strategy, which is followed by the development of a technology portfolio in support of the strategy. Now with changes in the business environment as well as in the technology developments, not only the technology alternatives may be outdated, but also the organizational strategy may have been revised. Therefore, the technology portfolio will need to be modified to reconfirm its optimality and to reintegrate with the revised organizational strategy. This chapter will present two qualitative tools for portfolio modification and reintegration.