Information Technology Driving Your Strategy

This video blew my mind. Over-hyped? It is five minutes, you have nothing to lose.

Driving Competitive Advantage with Information Visibility

In short it covers the basics on improving your company performance by standardizing your processes and/or enhancing individual discretion. It talks about how companies that focus on purely being more effective continue to deploy best practices that in all likely hood are either being used by others or will be used by others. It is a cat and mouse game. I have covered this topic in a little more detail here: What is Strategy? Not Operational Effectiveness.

What I found interesting is that software is primarily designed to help companies with operational effectiveness. I realize this is not true all the time, but for the most part it is. The premise of the video is the potential driving force behind information technology is not operational effectiveness but the data that is used to define, implement and monitor your strategy.

We are shifting from a world where information is used to feed a process to a world where information is arranged as the point of use to serve the decision at hand. They term this information visibility. Michael Porter, who provides the background to this video, sees information reinforcing strategy rather than drive it out.

How does this apply to product management? Easy. Who makes the decisions for your product? You. How do you make decisions? By organizing, studying and monitoring information.

From the review of Strategy and the Fat Smoker we learned that strategy is a set of rules or guidelines that tell you how to go about making decisions. As a result, to have the best strategy you need the best data. That call report you did last year, too old. The win/loss report from 2006, too old. You need to know what customers and prospects are asking for now. It needs to be understood and validated.

There are a number of tools and systems that will enable you to capture (in closer to real-time than if you were to do this manually), organize and validate this information so that you can effectively make decisions. Remember though, the tools and systems are the operational effectiveness. The individual discretion is the key to your strategy.

Related Posts: