Thought Leadership
MGA will feature a key organizational issue on this page. As they become available, we will add more thought leadership articles to the drop down menu.
Strategic Business Alignment
Strategic business alignment is essential to the success of an enterprise. A great strategy launched in absence of the necessary skill sets is not a winning hand. Business-IT alignment is a much discussed topic. Success is difficult to achieve when great employees must work around processes and technology not aligned with strategy. However, projected returns on investment for IT alignment will not be achieved without understanding alignment more broadly…alignment of all key elements of an enterprise.
MGA believes four “domains” must be coordinated to achieve strategic business alignment within an enterprise:
- Mission – the capabilities required to define how and to assure that, value is created or strategic competitive advantage is built. Clear mission, vision, values, and strategy are necessary components of this domain. Also included are controls, and processes for managing quality, risk, and performance.
- Market – the capabilities required to identify and connect with specific customer groups for whom the company intends to create value. Includes tasks involved in marketing the enterprise, developing products, and selling those products.
- Operations – the capabilities required to serve selected customers, manage the organization’s tangible assets (e.g. IT and capital), and to provide other support functions required to run the enterprise.
- Intangibles – the capabilities required to shape culture, nurture human capital, and sharpen an organization’s competitive edge.
The EPM Profiler™ serves as a simple platform from which to evaluate and promote alignment. The specific tasks associated with each domain align with the Profiler, making identification, measurement, and reporting on these tasks simple. Management can access information to evaluate alignment as required. And they can call upon that information when evaluating critical decisions from the perspective of alignment. So, alignment becomes an explicit consideration in many contexts.
Through this same approach, the execution of strategy, operational performance improvement, change management, enterprise risk management, and innovation are integrated into essentially a single decision process. Leaders can analyze the available information to evaluate each perspective. Each of these perspectives is considered explicitly when making critical decisions about tasks required to operate a business. An approach which aligns these functions raises the probability of achieving strategic business alignment.
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