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Being an IT executive has never been more challenging. the advent of the Internet and e-commerce has increased IT’s strategic importance to businesses while dramatically shortening IT decision-making and implementation cycles. IT managers have to make decisions now while the consequences will often have deep and far-reaching implications. IT executives are therefore caught in a growing dilemma: How do I make sensible strategic judgments while meeting the urgent time demands of the business?
IT decision-makers, therefore, require a strategic planning framework with some demanding attributes. The framework must be:
•Succinct, yet rich in content
•Fast, while allowing for due diligence
•Adaptable, while permitting subject-area focus
•Highly communicative, while negating the need for voluminous reading
•Rapidly understood, while eliminating the need for extensive preparation.
One strategic planning framework that meets these challenging requirements is called strategic repositioning. A visual system for modeling strategy options — in essence, an intuitive methodology that uses diagrams to communicate strategy — strategic repositioning meets all the requirements I’ve described to enable rapid, yet thoughtful, decision-making.
In this article, I’ll provide an introduction to strategic repositioning that you can use to position your organization to effectively meet the dilemma of rapid yet insightful strategic planning.
Strategic Repositioning
The notion that you can express the position of any business area, function, process, and so on pictorially is fundamental to strategic repositioning. That is, when a strategic problem confronts you, you can:
•Model the “as is” set of relevant positions
•Model the “to be” set of relevant positions
•Develop a set of actions to move the business between the two sets of positions.
You use positioning graphically to create situation-determined representation models to communicate the state of the current problem — the “as is” model — and the solution, the “to be” model. This technique lends itself to preparing alternative “to be” scenarios and supports rapid iteration to reflect changes that emerge from the strategy debate.
Thus, for a given problem, you would assert the following notation:
•Position Problem = (Relevant Position 1, Relevant Position 2,…Relevant Position n) or
•Pproblem = (RP1, RP2,…RPn) or
•Pproblem = Set off all the relevant positions.
The concept of positioning is recursive, so you could further partition a complicated position itself into meaningful subpositions. The essence of strategic repositioning is thus choosing what to position, determining how to graphically represent it, and then viewing the strategy as movement from Pcurrent position to Pfuture position.
Positioning Example 1: Kiviat Charts
A Kiviat chart is one graphical method for positioning processes. (See Figure 1.) A Kiviat chart is a set of radar circles numbered from 1 to 5 from a common center, where 1 represents a the highest state of excellence and a 5 represents the lowest. Radius lines drawn against the radar circles represent the subjects’ various attributes. In Figure 1, the connected solid lines illustrate the current position. Figure 2 illustrates the future position; the dashed line represents how you would wish to reposition the attributes. The difference in the lines clearly demarcates the strategic change that you wish to accomplish.
FIGURE 1 A Kiviat chart representing the “as is” position.
FIGURE 2 A Kiviat chart representing the “to be” position.
Positioning Example 2: Advantage Tables
Figure 3 (see this figure and all subsequent ones in the electronic version of this column at IntelligentEnterprise.com) is an example of an “advantage” table that you can use to position business applications. The current applications are positioned using lowercase letters on the dimensions of durability of competitive advantage (temporary or sustainable) and classification of competitive advantage (cost, focus, differentiation, execution, knowledge, and maneuverability). Figure 4 depicts the future (desired) position of each application in uppercase letters. Strategic repositioning is thus equivalent to moving each application from its current position (lowercase) to its future position (uppercase).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 4
Positioning Example 3: Generic Maturity Model
Figure 5 is a generic maturity model, which you may use to help you visualize the state of competencies for any discipline. The columns illustrate the degrees of competence from novice to world-class, and the rows depict the attributes of the competency subject area. Figure 6 illustrates how strategic repositioning equates to following each arrow from the “as is” competency to the “to be” competency.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 6
Designing Future Positions
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, “Water has no constant shape. The end of an army’s form is formlessness.” Water, of course, can rapidly change its shape and position in response to a new situation. Thus, the best form for an army is formlessness, because it can then morph itself into whatever winning defensive or offensive position combat requires.
The same is true with future IT positions. While designing future “to be” positions, it is important to design in high adaptability. All positions are temporary; however, the need to be able to change positions is permanent. So winning future positions for the age of the Internet and e-commerce are positions, like water, that can rapidly change their forms to whatever the current circumstances demand.
Strategic Actions
Strategic actions are the initiatives you need in order to move the business from the “as is” to the “to be” state. Strategic actions are the means of movement between states, and like position definition, they should be succinct and highly actionable.
For example, if you are doing a competencies repositioning, your actions may include training, hiring new employees with desired skills, and so on.
In their simplest yet most profound form, you can understand strategic actions as follows: I am here; I wish to get there; If I perform these actions, I will accomplish that goal.
Strategic Repositioning Deliverables
Because conciseness and speed are key attributes of the methodology, these same attributes apply to the deliverables. Outputs of the process consist of four deliverables:
•Statement of strategic problem being addressed
•“As is” set of position models
•“To be” set of position models (repositioning)
•List of actions.
During reviews and debates, criticism should focus on ways to change the models or actions. For example, if you used a Kiviat chart and someone doesn’t agree with an “as is” rating, she should state what the correct “as is” rating should be. If someone feels that the proposed actions are inadequate, he should state what additional actions should be added. In all cases, you should express criticism as an alteration to one or more of the models.
A Win-Win Situation
The need for rapid decision-making does not negate the need for insightful and prudent choices. While speed is of the essence, so is the life cycle efficacy of strategic decisions.
Strategic repositioning provides a visual language with which to communicate the essence of strategic alternatives. Through graphical representations, you can make “before and after” assessments swiftly yet with due diligence. In this way, you can position the IT assets to enable the business to win, prevailing over its competitors who have already lost.
Bernard “Bernie” Boar(bernard.boar@rcgitnj.com) is the author of six books on IT strategy and architecture and currently serves as director of strategic solutions for RCG Information Technology.
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