Enterprise Strategy Management

According to David Norton, author and professor at Harvard Business School, 90% of all business strategies fail to live up to their potential mainly due to poor execution. A Fortune magazine study has also shown that 7 out of 10 CEOs who fail, do so not because of bad strategy, but because of bad execution. And in a Times of London study of 1000 companies, 80% of directors said they had the right strategies, but only 14% thought they were implementing those strategies well.

When it comes to strategy success, execution is key. And to improve execution, organizations must develop a model that clearly defines objectives, choose the right metrics, maintain the focus on strategy, continuously monitor execution performance, and communicate strategic information across the organization. In fact, for a strategy to succeed, it has to be integrated into operations.

Once executives have overcome communication barriers, resistance to change, and cultural factors that can hinder strategy implementation, they are left with the need for the right tools to follow-through.

In one of his blogs, Norton writes:

It's been more than 15 years since Bob Kaplan and I first wrote about the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Since then, we've chronicled the evolution of this performance management framework, in a series of articles and books.

Our experience inside organizations has taught us that superior strategy execution requires a system, not a series of diverse projects performed in different parts of the organization.

Most organizations have parts of a strategy management system, such as strategy planning, budgeting, HR planning, or performance reporting.

But they function as silos, losing much of their potential value through lack of integration. Companies generally fail at implementing a strategy or managing operations because they lack an overarching management system to integrate and align these two vital processes.

Efficient and effective strategic management requires embracing closed-loop plan-do-check-act type management processes across all perspectives of the business in order to maintain the right strategic balance. Perspectives can cover automated and non-automated business aspects, as well as intangibles that are difficult to measure or quantify.

An overarching and integrated system that provides support for plans, tools and methodologies such as Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard (BSC) or Ishikawa's Hoshin Kanri, as well as objective and target setting, metric and key performance indicator (KPI) measurement across the entire business ecosystem, execution performance monitoring and reporting in real-time using dashboards and scorecards, and the ability to optionally define actions to be automatically carried out when execution deviates from or misses strategic targets is a critical management tool to align all activities and business aspects with a centrally-managed strategy.

BrightQuadrant can help you quickly and efficiently setup a strategic management solution that supports all your enterprise strategy implementation and business activity alignment needs. Take a look at our products and contact us now for a 45-minutes web demo. You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain!