11-Strategy maps

What makes an IT investment strategic, calling attention to the three primary objectives of the strategy map of end-use enterprises?

INNOVATION AND MARKETING

Peter Drucker, expert on management, wryly noted, “Only two things create value: innovation and marketing. All else is cost.”

The figure below depicts a generic strategy map, emphasizing the practical implementation of Drucker’s dictum in three generic strategies.

Strategy constitutes a mechanism or management system for directing or marshaling available resources to achieve maximum competitive advantage.

In many companies, meetings represent the primary and still most effective way of assessing, aligning, and directing available resources.

Well-managed meeting require leadership, an agreed-upon agenda, common sense rules, and a timeline.

The figure depicts the ever present but rarely acknowledged fact of all meetings related to strategy, customer engagement, and operational improvement:

How do the topics or issues of the meeting help one better understand or direct a force or forces facilitating the execution of strategy as well as help identify or reduce the effects of a force or forces hindering the execution of strategy?

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While simplistic in its formulation, effective innovation leaders make every effort to visually depict the strategies of the organization.

To that end, innovation leaders create Strategy Maps, following the brilliant models and prescriptives outlined the namesake book Strategy Maps—Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton.

Every firm will modify this generic strategy map to reflect the particulars of their financial focus, customer focus, process focus, and learning and growth focus.

However, several aspects of even this generic strategy map will remain unchanged for commercial enterprises: increase return on capital.

Generally, pursuit of greater return on capital entails one or combination of three basic strategies: improve productivity, increase sales in existing markets, and grow new sales in new products or services.

EXECUTION MYOPIA

Clarity and agreement about roles and accountabilities of individual contributors in a firm relate primarily to an execution-focused role: have a plan, work the plan.

The answer to the essential question of knowledge-worker productivity—“who owes what to whom, fulfilled how and by what criteria of satisfaction?”—becomes opaque and fraught with panic in the context of change.

Generally, most firms do not have a well-defined and practiced “change management” practice.

Lacking an effective change-management practice, most firms find that they cannot easily innovate new systems and process without evoking organizational fear, uncertainty, and doubt (OFUD).

Innovation leaders take responsibility for the pervasive lack accountability among affected stakeholders for innovation and change.

Innovation leaders design and convene meetings with affected stakeholders, modeling a future, co-developing a number of small-scale, rapidly executed projects, and facilitating affected stakeholders to assign their own accountabilities of innovation projects.

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