Improving Strategic Alignment

The economic crisis demonstrates how turbulent changes often require strategic shifts. Gartner (2009) states that through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets. A couple of factors facilitate organizational agility, support the early recognition of market changes, help to provide current and relevant information to decision makers and thereby improve the strategic alignment of the organization. Based on Gartner (2010) CIOs continue to view BI among their top priorities. The author intends to synthesize the available knowledge (concepts) and experience (case studies) to help organizations of all sizes and industries to gain new insights on how to benefit from a Strategic Business Intelligence Process^TM .

The Strategic Business Intelligence Process^TM describes a set of concepts to improve the strategic alignment via the definition of key performance indicators and using fact-based support systems for better decision-making. The following tasks, described in the book, should be performed to validate and implement the Strategic Business Intelligence Process:

- Validate the investment in the implementation of a Strategic Business Intelligence Process via a business case.

- Implement a Strategic Business Intelligence Process including:

·    Establish meaningful key performance indicators and understand cause and effect linkages between key performance
indicators (e.g. leading indicators affecting lagging indicators, balancing or reinforcing loops).

·    Establish strategic objectives and activities (e.g. establish a plan, interventions).

·    Measure and collect performance relevant information (e.g. data warehouse).

·    Communicate the facts (e.g. alerts, dashboards, broadcasting agents).

·    Perform analyses (e.g. OLAP, data mining).

·    Communicate the results of the analyses (e.g. E-Mail, meetings, dashboards), and reduce the time to strategy execution (minimizing the total time span from strategy definition to strategy execution).

·    Align decision making with the strategic objectives (optimizing transparency of objectives, degree of fulfillment, effect of past business interventions on goal achievement, predictions about future trends and their effect on goal achievement).