Connecting The Digital Dots - Vision, Strategy and Capability

Having worked in a number of global and international organisations, I have come across the received wisdom of National Stereotypes. One of the biggest beleifs that is often propgated is that Americans focus on Vision, Europeans major on Process Performance and Asian Companies prioritise Inoovation and Learning. I never really took this seriously until ISACA commissioned a ddutch academic to research the effectiveness of their COBIT framework.

The report into COBIT effectiveness was based on a survey of over 300 enterprises around the world who had adopted COBIT as their IT management framework (although ISACA would call it a governance framework). The analysis attempted to verify whether there was any correlation between using COBIT and positive outcomes in delivering strategic objectives, i.e. to validate the value. Unfortunately, any linkage was almost none existant. Further reading suggested that it would have been impossible for COBIT to have affected the outcome as most organisations were only using a few of the COBIT processes. It turned out that the organisations had really followed these stereotypes and the American organisations were only using the strategy processes, the Europeans seemed to be only using delivery focused processes and the Asian ones really were only doing innovation and training. 

Further to this, I have seen arguments between European and American attendees at at an International conference over what a Strategy actually contains. It seems that there is a transatlantic split over whether a Strategy should contain a plan or not.

So what does it mean to digitalorganisations and why is it important. Well digital organisations aim to be disruptive and aim to be agile, otherwise they become irrelevant. Yesterday's bright new product will get swamped by today's Me-too Copycats. So an organisation has to join up everything from Understanding the Market, To working out What Happens if you Re-write the Big Rules or assumptions that dominate the Market today (i.e. the disruption), to being able to deliver rapidly, learn from experimentation and perhaps failure, to continuously modify or even pivot the product so that they win and keep dominant positions. Richard Rumelt in Good Strategy Bad Strategy explains the need to diagnose the market, identify a course of action and chose proximate goals. Steve Denning covers Business Agility in a recent article in Forbes.

So this brings me to the Business Model Canvas. This is often touted as a strategic tool for defining your business model. To me it is does not facilitate the outward looking open question type thinking needed to look at the market and identify the New Business Rules and the Opportunities. A SWOT analysis would be better for that. Howvere it is basically a good structure for guided thinking which helps an enterprise think through and communicate what needs to be done to deliver against strategy.

Then there is the Lean Business Model Canvas, an adapted approach. Again it does not do the big outward thinking, but it does start with the Problem to be addressed. So it is useful for a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager to enage with the rest of an Integrated Product Team to plan what they are going to do to develop, sell and deliver the product (or even a customer facing set of products) effectively.