Business and Technology Strategy Alignment

This service is designed to assist our clients in aligning their business and technology strategies for maximum impact in their target markets.

Our strategic alignment model cycles the customer through four distinct alignment perspectives, where each perspective simultaneously addresses three of the four key operating areas of their business: business strategy, technology strategy, business process, and technology process.

Strategy execution perspective. With the business strategy as the driver, this perspective focuses on the changes to the underlying business processes that are required to execute that strategy. In addition, any gaps in the associated technology processes that need to be closed to support the required changes are also identified. This is the traditional, and most common, perspective that most organizations employ when thinking strategically about their business. Technology potential perspective. Keeping the business strategy as the anchor domain, but this time proceeding clockwise around the model, this perspective examines the changes needed in the associated technology strategy.

In a similar fashion as above, any gaps in the technology processes that need to be closed to support this revised technology direction are also isolated. This perspective helps flush out new technology ideas that might more effectively advance or extend the desired business strategy. This can be a powerful point of view for ensuring that an enterprise is maximizing its full technology potential.

Competitive potential perspective. This perspective shifts the anchor domain to the technology strategy and proceeds counterclockwise to focus on changes that are required in the business strategy to fully exploit the technology capabilities of the company. At the same time any modifications to the underlying business processes that are needed to enable these changes are highlighted. This perspective forces an organization to closely examine its technology assets and competencies in order to unlock them and release their competitive potential in the marketplace.

Service level perspective. Keeping the technology strategy as the driver, this perspective reverses direction and proceeds clockwise to examine the changes needed in the underlying technology processes. In addition, any gaps in the business processes that need to be closed to enable and exploit the improved technology infrastructure are identified. This perspective focuses the enterprise on the key technologies, platforms, and applications that make up the primary operational engine of the business so that its maximum performance can be extracted.

This continuous shift in perspective is one of the central tenets of our strategic alignment model. This gives an organization the ability to quickly converge on a set of business and technology strategies and the corresponding operating model that will deliver the desired value to their customers.

Other Strategy services:

Strategy Development Strategic Action Planning