Beyond just Strategies setting in business

One of the main priorities of business is to create opportunities but achieving this is not automatic and sporadic but need adequate methodology and systemic effort for its realization. The growth of business is a function of workable strategies put in place to raise the enterprise development to operate above limitation.  Strategies may implies different things to different people but  it can be tagged “researched ideas and facts gather to improve a particular process”

It can also be view as stated and formulated facts set to improve a particular situation. There are many approaches to what strategy means but the meaning is not most important but the application of it to a business.

Introduction: Why do you need BI strategy?

Business Intelligence: How to build successful BI strategy

Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey highlights that Business Intelligence (BI) is the top priority of CIOs. It is considered that BI can have a direct positive impact on business performance of an enterprise, dramatically improving the ability to accomplish the mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. If you are starting to build BI capabilities in your enterprise and you are not sure how to proceed, you aren’t alone. It is a challenge to design a successful BI enterprise by selecting the right combination of people, processes, and technology. To overcome this challenge, you need to build an effective BI strategy, which is driven by business objectives, enables stakeholders with better decision making capabilities and helps enterprise achieve desired goals. It is common for an enterprise to build a BI strategy only to find it on the shelf later, as it is not acceptable across the enterprise. Effective BI strategy should ensure that enterprise objectives, business strategy, investments, and BI are aligned. Enterprises that are able to connect BI to overall enterprise objectives become intelligent enterprises. It requires a conscious approach, a blending of enterprise resources to deliver a complete, consistent, and reliable source of information to fulfill the promise of BI. A BI initiative is of no use if it is not driven by the objectives of the enterprise. Implementing a BI solution should help enterprise in achieving the objective of advancing business by making the best use of information. It sounds easy but in very few places this goal is attained. It must be ensured that business requirements and enterprise objectives drive the iterations. You must establish strategy before bringing technology or techniques in the conversation.

Business intelligence is a very broad topic of study, however, if you would like your business to succeed, it is extremely important to understand the factors that influence BI and learn how to design an effective BI strategy. Prior to starting work on BI strategy, you must learn and document your overall business objectives to help formulate BI vision for the growth of business. After documenting the initial list of key objectives, you should work with the key stakeholders to confirm the validity of items on the list and their prioritization. This will ensure that you start building your BI strategy with a proper foundation aligned with your business and with the buy-in from stakeholders.

Why Don’t Good Strategies Lead to Good Results?

The performance gap between strategy creation and benefit realization is frequently a company’s inability to execute the strategies they define. Larry Bossidy, the former CEO at Allied Signal and Honeywell, and the co-author of Execution: the Discipline of Getting Things done, say it like this: “Corporate strategies are intellectually simple; their execution is not. The question is, can you execute? That’s what differentiates one company from another.”

So what makes this road to strategic execution so precarious? The most commonly identified potential hazards can be grouped into four basic categories: Clarification, Communication, Alignment and Measurement.

Clarification

A strategy must be a tangible, relevant statement of business intent, rather than a collection of broad, sweeping statements that force individual interpretation. The strategies often lean heavily on financial outcomes as the destination, without specifying the roadmap of objectives that drive those expected results. For example, a company may claim that they will be #1 and double revenue in five years, without providing any insight into what value proposition, customer segment, geography, product or channel will differentiate them in the marketplace and make these goals a reality. Without clear connections between the drivers, actions, outcomes and rewards, a strategy is irrelevant to the organization as a whole.

Poor clarification of the value proposition, in particular, is not a trivial detour on this journey. The value proposition is the archstone of an organization’s overall strategy. The extent to which a company can provide a relevant, differentiated value proposition to its customers not only drives financial performance, it provides valuable insight into the processes, competencies and culture it must cultivate to be successful.

The benefit of creating a clear value proposition is evident at a company like Southwest Airlines: the low-cost, high performing carrier. Southwest uses this concisely stated value proposition to prioritize investment in people, processes and technology, thus delivering optimal value to its customers. At many companies, however, this value proposition is uncertain or unshared, even among executive team members. If a company cannot clearly and crisply define the value it provides internally, it is hard to imagine that value being clear to external customers.

Communication

Even when clearly defined, strategy isn’t always effectively communicated. Often, an organization’s size and complexity makes communication of even the most concise strategy statements challenging. Establishing a common language for communicating strategy, and enabling that communication at every level is nearly as important as creating the strategy itself.

Alignment

Clear, concise strategies that are effectively communicated still can’t drive significant value unless the entire organization understands how their individual actions are strategically aligned. In many cases, strategies are defined at the pinnacle of an organization, with no clear cascade of responsibility for the tactical specifics necessary to achieve results. High-level strategies must be broken down into specific 4 Sub-objectives, which can then be owned and executed at every organizational level.

Measurement

A final obstacle on the road to strategic execution is the inability of most companies to accurately measure true strategic performance. Too many organizations focus measurement efforts on lagging financial outcomes (lag indicators) instead of key drivers of performance (leading indicators). As a result, intangible assets are typically undervalued or not measured at all. These intangible assets can account for 80% of a company’s valuation, and are the key levers to pull when making corrective actions. Examples of intangible assets include management effectiveness, process excellence, brand recognition and innovation. Focus on tangible assets alone, like financial results and budget discrepancies, limits management’s view of performance to past performance alone. To effectively measure past performance and make accurate predictions of future performance a more holistic approach to measurement is necessary.

”. Incase you are affected by this article forward your opinion, question, enquires and consultation, and problems, to: slybizinfobank@gmail.com or syolanconglomerate@gmail.com