The Strategy Gap: Leveraging Information Technology to Create and Execute Winning Strategies - Hardcover

Hartlen, Brian; Ganster, Dennis G.; King, David R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0471214507 ISBN 13: 9780471214502

Verlag: Wiley & Sons, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

With shortened business cycles, increased competition, and rapidly changing technologies, companies need to be more nimble than ever. They must narrow the gap between strategy formulation and operation execution to guarantee success. The Strategy Gap will provide a framework that senior financial managers can use to ensure that their strategies are implemented successfully and that their corporations remain competitive. Filled with informative case studies and best practices for optimum financial processes, this valuable resource will help managers leverage information technology to successfully implement corporate strategies. This book also shows managers how to eliminate surprises in poorly managed or unforeseen activities, while applying new approaches to financial management for faster and more accurate business modeling. Expert advice from those who have used these strategies clearly explains how to integrate planning, budgeting, consolidation, and reporting into one cohesive management system.

Michael Coveney is senior director of strategy management and spearheads Comshare s successful best practices consultancy, helping enterprises improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their corporate performance management processes.

Brian Hartlen is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Comshare, Incorporated, a leading provider of software that helps companies implement and execute strategy.

Dave King, PhD, is Comshare s Senior Vice President of Product Development and Chief Technology Officer.

Dennis Ganster is Chairman, President and CEO of Comshare, Inc.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL COVENEY is Senior Director of Strategy Management for Comshare, Incorporated, a leading provider of software to help companies implement and execute strategy.
DENNIS GANSTER is Chairman, President, and CEO of Comshare.
BRIAN HARTLEN is Senior Vice President of Marketing for Comshare.
DAVE KING, PhD, is Senior Vice President of Product Development as well as Chief Technology Officer for Comshare.

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Worldwide, three out of four senior executives cite strategic planning as todays most powerful tool for improving long-term performance. Yet the global corporate landscape is littered with the remnants of organizations that crafted "breakthrough" strategic planscomplete with missions, objectives, goals, and strategiesonly to tumble headlong into the gulf between the creation of that plan and its actual implementation.

But what are the root causes behind that "strategic gap" between strategy formulation and execution? Why do so many well-intentioned strategic systems fail at bridging it? And most important, what are todays most successful companies doing to circumnavigate that gap and, in some cases, use it to their advantage?

The Strategy Gap reveals a step-by-step process for effectively executing strategy by integrating best practices for corporate performance management (CPM) techniques with state-of-the-art information technologies. Written by senior officers at Comshare, Incorporated, one of todays foremost global providers of software for implementing and executing effective corporate strategy, this premiere resource will help you to:

• Determine whether your organizations strategy gaps are rooted in management, process, or technology issuesand move to resolve those issues
• Move beyond transaction processing systems to incorporate key managerial processes
• Integrate applications for better across-the-board utilization of company resources
• Understand and use not only financial data but also nonfinancial performance indicators to drive improvement
• Take proactive steps to both add value and communicate that value to financial markets and shareholders

As you read these words, scores of corporate decision-makers are combining up-to-date processes, methodologies, and systems to dramatically reduce the time spent shepherding strategic initiatives from creation to implementation. Discover what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what you must do to meet and even surpass their successes, in The Strategy Gap.

But what are the root causes behind that "strategic gap" between strategy formulation and execution? Why do so many well-intentioned strategic systems fail at bridging it? And most important, what are todays most successful companies doing to circumnavigate that gap and, in some cases, use it to their advantage?

The Strategy Gap reveals a step-by-step process for effectively executing strategy by integrating best practices for corporate performance management (CPM) techniques with state-of-the-art information technologies. Written by senior officers at Comshare, Incorporated, one of todays foremost global providers of software for implementing and executing effective corporate strategy, this premiere resource will help you to:

• Determine whether your organizations strategy gaps are rooted in management, process, or technology issuesand move to resolve those issues
• Move beyond transaction processing systems to incorporate key managerial processes
• Integrate applications for better across-the-board utilization of company resources
• Understand and use not only financial data but also nonfinancial performance indicators to drive improvement
• Take proactive steps to both add value and communicate that value to financial markets and shareholders

As you read these words, scores of corporate decision-makers are combining up-to-date processes, methodologies, and systems to dramatically reduce the time spent shepherding strategic initiatives from creation to implementation. Discover what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what you must do to meet and even surpass their successes, in The Strategy Gap.

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The Strategy Gap

Leveraging Technology to Execute Winning StrategiesBy Michael Coveney Dennis Ganster Brian Hartlen Dave King

John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0-471-21450-7

Chapter One

Strategy Gap

WHAT GAP?

We often come across companies that have set an ambitious long-term goal, perhaps to double revenue and profits over five years, or to dramatically increase the proportion of revenues coming from new businesses, but have devoted almost no intellectual effort to thinking through the medium-term capability-building program that is needed to support that goal. In too many companies there is a grand, and overly vague, long-term goal on one hand ... and detailed short-term budgets and annual plans on the other hand ... with nothing in between to link the two together.... There seems to be, in many companies, an implicit assumption that the short term and long term abut each other, rather than being dovetailed together. But the long term doesn't start at year five of the current strategic plan. It starts right now! -Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future

Long-term goals and detailed, short-term budgets, with nothing to link the two together. Does this organization sound familiar?

Whatever the answer, most business professionals understand that achieving a long-term goal requires a series of logical, achievable, sequential steps. Organizations cannot rely on chance or luck. Yet the steps that lead from where a business is today to where it wants to be-its objectives-often are missing.

The "strategy gap," as this group of missing steps is called in this book, is real and exists within most organizations. Often unseen, the gap is a threat to the future performance-and even survival-of an organization and is guaranteed to impact the efficiency and effectiveness of senior executives and their management team.

Imagine for a moment that you are early in your chosen career and the thought of retiring is many, many years away. However, your objective is to retire early, perhaps at 55. To achieve this objective, you have to start planning and executing the plan today. It is no use waiting until you are in your 40s to start executing the plan; it will be too late and you will need to push that retirement date out much farther than desired.

Or consider an oil tanker navigating its way into a port. Newton's law says that a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless something changes it. An oil tanker weighing 500,000 tons requires over an hour and six miles just to slow down from 15 knots. This means that the plan to stop has to be executed well in advance of the intended result.

It is the same in business. Organizations must plan and start executing that plan today if they expect to achieve their objectives some time in the future. Yet surveys indicate that this just is not happening. Despite the increased spending on systems and the technological advances in recent years, only 33 percent of executives take advantage of electronic decision support tools that could help them in managing performance.

The failure of organizations to manage the transition from where they are to where they want to be is one of the most critical management challenges facing senior executives today. Consider that in 2001, more than 250 U.S. organizations-with a combined asset value exceeding $255 billion-failed. As this book is being written, companies are on track to match that figure in 2002. More than 25 percent of the top 100 U.S. companies that survived in 2001 lost at least 66 percent of their market capitalization. Without the ability to achieve objectives, executives and managers become mere bystanders in an organization where performance-or nonperformance-"just happens."

So what is going wrong? What is it about the strategic planning process and its execution that fails? Why do systems so frequently fail to live up to management's expectations? These are crucial questions that need to be answered if the strategy gap is to be avoided.

FAILURE OF STRATEGIC PLANS

According to the dictionary, strategy is "a plan," "an approach," and "a line of attack." There are many different types of strategy, which will be discussed in the next chapter. For now, consider strategy to be "the art of guiding, forming, or carrying out an action plan." When applied to business, strategic planning is about deciding where an organization wants to go and how it is going to get there.

Strategic planning is still the most widely used tool for managing the performance of an organization. In Bain & Company's annual survey of senior executives from around the world, 76 percent of these executives said they look to strategic planning as the top management tool to improve long-term performance and to strengthen integration across an organization. Despite the appearance of many other tools, the report states that senior management trusts familiar tools during difficult times.

Strategic plans typically have a structure that makes them easy to follow. Most start by stating the purpose of the organization, which is usually followed by documenting the long- and short-term goals and the plans for achieving these goals. However, the terminology contained within these plans often varies between organizations, and the words have different meanings. In the context of this book, these definitions will be used:

Mission. A concise statement of the organization's reason for existing

Objectives. Broad statements describing the targeted direction

Goals. Quantifications of objectives for a designated period of time

Strategies. Statements of how objectives will be achieved and the major methods to be used

Tactics. Specific action steps that map out how each strategy will be implemented

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Measures of performance that show progress of each tactic in reaching the goals

For its Apollo space program, for example, NASA's strategic plan may have looked something like this:

Mission: Lead all other nations in the race for space. Objective: Send a man to the moon and bring him back alive.

Goals: Be the first to do it. Do it by the end of the decade.

Strategy 1: Investigate and select safe landing sites for manned missions.

Tactic 1: Create and launch a series of unmanned spacecrafts to take and transmit high-quality pictures of the moon back to Earth for scientific study.

KPI 1: Launch moon reconnaissance spacecraft by the middle of year 2 of the plan and analyze photos by the end of that year.

For a manufacturer of consumer electronics today, the strategic plan may look like this:

Mission: Be the premier global provider of consumer electronics.

Objective: Expand the cellular phone product line.

Goals: Cellular sales for all regions will be 35 percent of total revenue with an overall increase in revenue of 5 percent.

Strategy 1: Target a new market segment-senior citizens.

Tactic 1a: Launch a new cell phone with larger pushbuttons and a "panic" button that connects the user immediately with the local emergency response unit, coupled with a special senior citizen discount rate.

KPI 1a:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley & Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0471214507
• ISBN 13: 9780471214502
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar