Is Automation The Future Of Business Strategy Management?

An opinion piece in Forbes (from 2011) got us thinking about what 2012–and beyond–holds for business strategy. At a time when businesses continue to seek out opportunities for software and technology to create process, productivity and cost efficiencies by automating wherever possible, can the processes of business strategy itself–the response to and execution of it within an organization–and even product innovation, ever be automated or facilitated by technology?

According to the author of the Forbes article, while enterprise software and data analysis tools generate productivity gains (and more informed decision-making) for many businesses, most businesses still stumble in determining the ideal (and still very human process) of actualizing business strategy and synchronizing company activities against changing business priorities. Existing enterprise systems may provide employees with additional data or productivity tools, but they do not communicate or help inform employees of new priorities based on strategy changes made by management. By employing enterprise software and technology to inform managers of the effect of these decisions on their individual group’s goals, aligned against the company’s goals, the process of synchronizing priorities and actions to changes in corporate strategy could theoretically be automated quite effectively effectively.

We like the theory behind this idea not because it strives to automate the development of business strategy itself, but because it strives to automate the connection between strategy and individual team objectives/actions based on an agreed upon framework. If a strategy changes, then the objectives change or are re-aligned; the software is responsible for alerting employees of these changes, leaving no room for doubt as to how a change in strategy impacts their priorities, objectives, and whatever performance metrics they will be measured against.

We wonder if Business Process Management software like that developed by IBM, Intuit and others offer a customizable platform that major companies are already using to facilitate the synchronization of strategy change to internal team objectives and priorities. This is an area we’ll be curious to research, discuss and learn more about this year – and would love to hear from you about any of your own case studies of companies currently employing enterprise software this way.

Forbes: The Changing Face of How Work Gets Done