Market Focused Strategy

Market focused strategies and practical measures to implement them.

Not everything that is called a strategy deserves the name.  A company’s goals and objectives are sometimes called its “strategy” even if they are never translated into concrete business activity. Real business strategies are expressed in the daily life of the organization. A real business strategy makes a difference in what people do and how they do it, day in and day out.

Much of what people do all day is accomplished through the medium of business technology, most notably in the form of business applications.  Some of this technology is strategically neutral – that is, it neither enforces nor impedes the company’s strategic direction.  There is a tendency to think of most business technology as strategically neutral (our strategy is about selling widgets, not paying the phone bill).  But when companies attempt to change their behavior in accordance with their strategic direction, they often find that their technological infrastructures are far less strategically neutral than they had expected.

Any company’s business technology evolves over time.  At any given time it is the aggregate result of thousands of individual choices, most of which are made in apparent isolation, according to criteria (usually technical) that rarely seem strategic in nature.  But the combined effect of all these choices can’t help but have strategic implications. What we need, and quite often lack, are practical methods for translating strategic goals and objectives into concrete business practices – that is, methods that allow the choices that cumulatively direct the evolution of our business technology to be informed by our chosen strategic direction.

It is a truism that initiatives to acquire and implement business technology (say, an ERP, CRM or SCM product) must be driven by well-researched statements of requirements; anyone who doubts that isn’t likely to be reading this.  But three aspects of this are often less than well understood:

• The mechanics of effectively translating strategic goals and objectives into usable, concrete statements of requirements.
• Stating requirements so thoroughly and concretely that no one could imagine that they were being fulfilled during implementation, only to discover later that they were not.
• Extending and evolving the statement of requirements beyond initial implementation, into the lengthy period of maturation, maintenance and incremental change that lies between major system changeovers.

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