Once upon a time, I was evaluating starting a cloud-based analyst company. The idea would be to obtain more information about the market or industry through a wide-spread network. Trouble was, I really don’t know the inner workings of the analyst business model. Then, Matthew Littlefield started LNS Research and did it.

The FDT Group is taking a page from that idea by publicly releasing a cloud-based link to its technology roadmap process. Seeking broad industry input and collaboration to strengthen the future capabilities and market scope of the FDT standard is the goal of this program.

“The FDT Group has always been very good at collecting and processing input from a variety of end points within our industry,” observes Dan DeYoung of Rockwell Automation who serves as Chairman of the FDT Group Technology Marketing Committee. “By moving our data collection into a cloud-based technology, we break down the last remaining barrier to individuals and organizations wishing to contribute to the development of our technology roadmap. Industry pundits have contributory access 24/7 and are able to stay up to date on the technology roadmap by requesting push updates as to the
status of their contribution.”

Anyone in the industry is welcome to contribute. The tool allows the contributor to describe the proposed new feature or capability for the FDT standard as well as a simple use case. Options are provided to push updates to the contributor if desired. All input is reviewed and prioritized by the FDT Group Technology Marketing committee. Once incorporated into the technology roadmap, the FDT Group Architecture and Specification committee takes over to engineer the capability into the FDT standard and release it to the public.

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