Strategy & Tactics

[Frank Patrick]

Thread on strategy and tactics...

[Readerman]

Looking for ideas on how do I visually represent stategy and the tie to tactics which I think should be a reprensentation to a business process. The additional challenge is to map IT initiatives to the corresponding business process

[Donna Fitzgerald]

One possible approach would be to consider using Strategy Maps. This is a visual representation of a balanced score card approach that allows you to see not only the strategy but the themes and the way one element supports other elements in the strategy.

I'm curious why you want to map your initiatives to current business processes. While it has the advantage of forcing consistency it also has the disadvantage of stifling innovation. Classically IT portfolios are heavy on enhancements and light on innovation which an enforced business process mapping might tend to re-enforce if it is done as part of the annual or biannual planning process

[dennisstevens]

We are using a process called business capability mapping very successfully to address this specific need. Basically, you define the business as a set of capabilities. A capability describes what the business does and and at what level of performance. It is not a process because it doesn't describe how it gets done. This lets the business capability model stay pretty stable over time. For example, you have to Perform Payroll whether you do it manually, through your accounting system, or outsource it. Describe the business, and the external constituents, in terms of capabilities.

Then you identify which of the capabilities are related to the business strategy. You can ask three questions to do this. 1. Is the capability directly related to delivering on a strategic objective? 2. Is the capability directly related to a competitive differentiator? 3. If you were five times better at this capability, would the business be five times better? For example, getting five times better at payroll is probably not as important as getting five times better at sales.

Then you identify performance gaps in the capabilities. This can be subjective or objective. The key is to identify how you measure the performance of a capability.

We deliver a heat map that shows high business value, low performing capabilities. Then we map people, IT, and process initiatives to those capabilities. It becomes pretty straight-forward to describe specific capability performance improvements expected from an initiative. You can also very clearly describe whether the improvement maps to performance gaps and improving business value.

An additional benefit is that this approach overcomes the structural conflict associated with different silo's wanting to all get "their fair share." It creates a common perspective to share among different stakeholders, like IT and business managers. It also makes it very clear what to focus on next.

Very simple, very visual, very powerful. I am presently putting together some training materials on how to develop one of these. Maybe I could use some of the people from this forum for feedback on the materials.