Strategy management

Use cloud to accelerate your business outcomes.

The purpose of strategy is to help you succeed. Rather than developing detailed action plans that are based on forecasts, strategy focuses on articulating high-level priorities that give coherence and direction to your subsequent decisions and actions. Having a strategy can help focus your efforts on the pursuit of long-term goals, facilitate decision making, and promote coordination between different teams.

Start

Focus on identifying clear and consistent long-term goals and values that are rooted in a deep understanding of the external environment and a detailed evaluation of your organization’s capabilities and resources. When evaluating the external environment, focus on technological developments, evolving customer expectations, regulatory changes, as well as supplier and competitor behaviors. Your strategy should articulate how your organization will use its capabilities to deploy its resources within the external environment to meet its long-term goals. It should also indicate how your organization will organize itself to ensure effective implementation.

If you already have a strategy, evaluate your strategic fit; the alignment of your capabilities, resources, goals, and values with the threats and opportunities in the external environment. Ideally, key strategic priorities may have already been articulated in your company’s annual report, chairman's letter to stakeholders, organizational strategy, or corporate plan.

Gain leadership consensus on the key strategic priorities for your organization and develop a technology strategy that accelerates related business outcomes, including reduced business risk, improved ESG performance, increased revenue, and improved operational efficiency.

Start by identifying how you can take advantage of the cloud to meet your business goals and what cloud capabilities can provide you with a strategic advantage. Next, identify opportunities for retiring technical debt. This may include migration and modernization of legacy infrastructure, applications, and data and analytics platforms. Doing so may help you lower your risk profile through improved reliability and business continuity, increased performance, and enhanced security. Your strategy should clearly articulate how technology transformation is expected to accelerate the attainment of your business goals.

Get clarity on how key processes will use data and new technologies to optimize your technology and business operations. This may include using new data and analytics platforms to create actionable insights, or using machine learning (ML) to improve your customer service experience, employee productivity and decision-making, business forecasting, fraud detection and prevention, industrial operations, and so on. Doing so may help you improve operational efficiency while lowering operating costs and improving employee and customer experience.

Consider how your business and technology teams orchestrate their efforts to create customer value and help meet your strategic intent. Organizing your teams around products and value streams while using agile methods to rapidly iterate and evolve will help you become more responsive and customer-centric.

Recognize that differences may exist organizationally between how business division product teams are organized and operate. Define a target state for ‘what good looks like’ within your organization for how high performing product teams operate to map your Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) operational practices for optimizing new product management processes.

Make sure to seek and incorporate input from a broad range of organizational stakeholders, including senior management responsible for strategy formulation, those who will be affected by the key strategic decisions, and those who will be responsible for the implementation of strategic initiatives. Input from insiders may be especially critical as they usually have intimate knowledge about the gaps and opportunities in their daily operations.

Advance

Once you have embedded technology in your current business model, explore how you can use technology to reimagine your business strategy and shape your operating model.

Given the rapidly evolving technology and business environments, your strategies should be continuously reevaluated based on disproven assumptions and/or emerging developments. To avoid decision-making bias and to ensure management credibility, having formal strategy reevaluation mechanisms is especially important.

Excel

Use technology to shape your corporate strategy and build new digital businesses.