Simple! Strategic Alignment!!
Harvard Business Review (HBR) is quite clear when it states “The best-performing companies are often the best aligned.” [1]
Strategic alignment is defined as “the process of bringing the actions of an organisation’s business divisions, staff members, processes and culture into a unified line, to help assure that all of its divisions and employees are jointly and fully working toward the organisation’s stated goals and key business purpose.”
The challenge, HBR goes on to say is that “executives tend to focus on one of these areas to the exclusion of others, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together.” [2]
HBR’s statement and the above definition are supported by the success of companies like McDonald’s, Toyota and Disney, all recognized as leaders in designing, deploying and monitoring their measures, KPI’s, objectives, capabilities, resources, and systems for direct alignment to their organisation’s purpose. Strategic alignment is not about the validity or strength of a company’s strategy, it is simply the momentum and focuses created if everyone and everything is pushing in the same direction. However, after years of unrestrained growth, mergers, acquisitions, cultural challenges, global expansion and competing stakeholder interests, the best practice of strategic alignment is acutely missing in many companies. The need for strategic alignment, against the backdrop of greater global competition, tighter regulations, growing individual accountability on management and increased shareholder expectations, has never been greater.
Alignment in our organisation? Nearly impossible!
Such alignment in focus, intention, and behavior, without the help of specialist technology, is nearly impossible. Achieving strategic alignment and the associated business outcomes requires more than just planning. They require a technology to support an execution framework, bringing information and data from across the organisation into a single, unified and actionable management ‘cockpit’.
Corporater’s Business Management Platform is specifically designed to enable this strategic alignment, helping global organizations like HSBC, Johnson & Johnson, IKEA and Tata Steel to deliver improved business performance.
Within Corporater, clients can define a specific model or framework (like a strategy execution framework, or even a governance model, regulation, project management approach, compliance or risk model) and cascade it simultaneously across a variety of organisational hierarchies (like geography, product line, brand, department or legal entity).
Then, by linking management disciplines (and associated data) across areas like governance, risk, strategy, operations, quality, projects, processes, HR, and finance into a single ‘actionable’ interface, Corporater can enhance planning, generate insight, govern & manage processes and provide the right business context for management to make more informed decisions. All underpinned with the execution capabilities of automatically or manually triggering processes and workflow as things change and require action.
Across each level of the organisation, Corporater clients connect their strategy, budgeting, and planning process with objectives, metrics, goals, risks, financial resources, projects and activities to support management decision making, set those decisions into action and fully align their organisation’s people and resources to all push in the same direction.
Configurable by business users, Corporater also provides alignment functionality to:
- Manage projects and programmes via Gantt charts
- Manage risks and mitigating actions
- Provide contextual commentary anywhere in the model/framework
- Alert based on the business rule defined exceptions
- Roll back in time with full audit trails
- Assign, monitor and manage categorized actions (aged and by owner)
- Delegate actions
- Capture meeting minutes and document meeting governance
- Benchmarking to easily rank and compare any criteria
- Scorecards with user-defined thresholds for KPI management
- Full template reporting via Powerpoint, Word, and Excel
- Personal task lists, reminders, notifications, and alerts
