Do you Know What Resources You Need For Your Business Strategy?

Can you summarize your organization’s strategy or your company business’s strategy in 20 words or less? If so, would your colleagues or your partner put it the same way?

From my experience, I would say that very few executives can honestly answer these simple questions in the affirmative. And the companies that those executives or managers work for are often the most successful in their industry.  Why? Because those executives know what is long-term business planning and how they can work to achieve organization objectives. Companies that don’t have a simple and clear statement of strategy are likely to fall into the sorry category of those that have failed to execute their strategy or, worse, those that they think they have one! This in turn, has a negative impact on frontline employees, and all those in between are frustrated because no clear strategy exists for the company or its lines of business.

The kinds of complaints that abound in such firms include:
“I try for months to work in creating new online marketing campaign to our company, and then it is shut down because ‘it doesn’t fit the strategy.’ Why didn't anyone tell me that at the beginning?”

“Why are we hiring or selecting this vendor again? The vendor submitted an offer last year but did not abide on supplying, and I thought it is not worth it to waste our time and repeat same scenario."

“Should I cut the price for this customer? I don’t know if we would be better off winning the deal at a lower price or just losing the business.”

For instance, I have an experience in IT industry and digital marketing media field; I would therefore talk through this perspective and sketch out the role of IT on company strategy.

Information Technology has become a key business function for almost every organization and most have great expectations of their investment in IT for the future benefits to the business – expectations that will enable the business to:-

-Reduce costs;
-Standardize processes;
-Enhance productivity;
-Improve workflow and communications;
-Sustain repeatable service levels;
-Implement new business strategies;

Despite the growing trend towards building solid business and adoption right concept of strategic tools in a company, there are still real opportunities for IT to make a difference. But the IT contribution is less likely to take the form of the ‘killer’ application that gives specific competitive advantage – it is far more likely that the principal benefit will be derived from having robust, but adaptable, technology throughout the organization, thus facilitating an agile business strategy.

This also includes the digital marketing part and its role in company business strategy especially when we the company plans to grow the business and build up a solid reputation, for instance building a digital tools for trust-based marketing to match company’s objectives, and understanding the role of customers or target audience as a stockholder in business growing

But, if our strategy is not clearly visible – how can we ever hope to align anything with it, let alone the IT function? The answer is that we must move beyond the conceptual level of most strategic thinking, towards a practical, physical expression of the alignment process.

Quite simply, we need a tangible alignment plan that will help us to realize our ambition of complete harmony between our IT and business strategy / or our digital tools and business strategy. ( As mentioned earlier from IT and Digital Marketing aspects)

I would say, organizations that have been able to successfully integrate technology and business strategy have created significant business returns.
Information Technology (IT) and Digital Marketing has become an important enabler of business strategies in such areas of mass customization, competitive differentiation, quality improvements, and process automation and improvement.