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Making Strategy Real

Description: Once the strategy has been defined however, nine out of ten organizations fail to implement it effectively. Trends such as globalization, increasingly empowered customers, and rapid and accelerating change make closing the gap between strategy and execution more critical than ever. The current difficult economic environment only increases this imperative. We are no longer living in the "rising tide lifts all boats" world of recent years and effective execution is front and center in the corporation. Today, many boats are sinking.

What is the answer? How can management communicate the strategy effectively and assure that the entire organization has bought in to the strategy and is aligned behind it? Business performance optimization systems are an important tool for success. As corporations are blessed (and cursed) with ever increasing amounts of rapidly changing data, decision-making limited to the executive suite or any one silo in the firm is no longer a viable option. This can lead to strategy disconnected from operations, decisions made without context and a lack of coordination across the organization and throughout the business ecosystem. Utilizing business performance optimization systems, empowered employees can confidently make timely, strategically aligned decisions based upon facts as opposed to intuition or corporate politics. These tools also enable transparency and act as a basis for enterprise risk management.

These tools can fundamentally change our organizations. The role of management is no longer that of "ultimate decision-maker" but that of "translator" and "coach" who initiates the strategy and define the metrics which bring the efforts of each stakeholder into alignment with the strategy as a whole. Good strategy effectively implemented can provide the sustainable competitive advantage that all organizations aspire to.

Publisher: SAP