Barry’s Business Intelligence Blog

Here they are:

1. What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors?
2. What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage?
3. What are the three most significant gaps or barriers that keep us from leveraging this advantage?
4. What are the three things we can pursue to close the gaps, overcome the barriers and positively influence our three most important measures?

Answering those four questions with the right leaders will result in an artifact that visually articulates your strategy in a way that is easy to communicate across the organization.  It represents a performance dashboard that (with the appropriate process) supports feedback loops which can allow the vision to change and evolve with the competitive landscape.  It becomes a tool that helps establish goals and metrics (both leading and lagging indicators) while providing a framework to approve and prioritize projects that ultimately drive the strategy.  Sounds great doesn’t it?  (Uh-oh here comes the but) but in I’ve only ever worked with one organization that really has done this!  I’ve known many organizations that exercise the process of establishing a strategy map (or other strategic planning methodology) and then never referred to it again.  It’s a strange circumstance almost as if they are putting a check on a list to say, “Yes we’ve done this!”, smile happily and go back to doing things as they always have.  Norton and Kaplan certainly don’t need my help in promoting or explaining their well respected strategic planning methodology, but (there’s that word again) those familiar with strategy maps may have noticed that there doesn’t appear to be any positing of a hypothesis that’s intended to drive performance.  Where’s the product innovation, customer understanding or operational effectiveness!  It’s madness…or possibly there’s another point.

Before any organization can discuss what’s then next (or maybe one of many) strategies they will pursue they need to know who they are.  Its helpful (in a Good to Great Jim Collins sort of way) in achieving success to have single coherent vision to share, foster and grow throughout an organization.  In those rare situations where there may be a disconnected understanding of strategy or direction the discussion driven by the four questions above can result in establishing, re-establishing or clarifying your organization’s vision.  Sounds simple, almost as if you could sprinkle pixie-dust on the problem to fix it.  It’s not.  In a company where the leadership is invested and passionate these discussion can be the intellectual equivalent of a rowdy brawl.  It’s worth the bloody knuckles and black eyes to get it right.  How can you talk about what’s next if you don’t know what’s first?

So what’s a strategy map?  Here’s the ubiquitous Southwest Airlines example:

Look at that!  You have the strategy, “Improve Ground Time Turn Around”, a visual representation of time bound objectives tied to goals providing lagging and leading indicators that are then used to create a scorecard.  From there you develop the specific tasks/projects that need to happen to meet their goals. How can you not love this?  I’m not going to try and explain this fully.  There’s a large body of work out there on this subject by folks with bigger squishier brains then mine.  I will suggest that learning this methodology and applying it will be the most valuable thing you do this year.

Now if someone would just talk about how you apply this to business intelligence!  Until next week…