The Formulate suite of tools allows an organization to analyze and monitor the external industry factors and competitive drivers necessary to better identify emerging opportunities and/or threats. Without looking beyond the confines of the organization's existing value chain, breakthrough strategic vision is rarely viewable. The Formulate suite also has tools for conducting strategic vision, developing plans, creating portfolios, and preparing new goals and initiatives for eventual deployment.
Align
The Align suite of tools provides an organization with visual control over strategy deployment and enables new capabilities to connect and integrate key strategic elements. Enterprise alignment can be achieved and maintained by creating strategy and/or operational alignment frameworks for all units across an organization, with each strategy framework aligning business unit initiatives to support overall strategic direction and performance measures while establishing clear accountability for implementation. An integrated alignment architecture provides organizations with the capability to manage live strategy implementation and track enterprise-wide results - all in real-time. The larger and more complex the organization, the higher the priority for an integrated alignment architecture to manage its intricate interdependencies.
Implement
The Implement suite consists of easy-to-use strategy implementation tools designed to oversee the deployment and tracking of key initiatives, projects, processes, and performance metrics. The Performance Management tool in ESM does more than just set and track performance metrics - it is specifically designed to move the performance dials in the right strategic direction by employing tight integration with initiatives, strategies and project management functionality. In that regard, ESM is not your typical metric-centric "balanced scorecard" approach, which often starts and ends with cascading, static goals.
Becoming overly reliant on textbook-inspired strategy maps and generic balanced scorecard software can be detrimental to achieving breakthrough strategic results. The typical non-integrated, shrink-wrapped software package does little to differentiate an organization from its competition and, therefore, rarely results in powerful and unique strategic vision.
Deployment
Stratana's ESM software utilizes open design standards that enable it to sit above - and communicate with - other enterprise applications. Integration with existing ERP, business intelligence, performance management, and/or project management tools is fast and cost effective, allowing for rapid customization that is often unheard of with similar software offerings. The ability to rapidly customize the embedded strategy processes, tools, navigation, and terminology to match an organization's existing business and I.T. strategy processes is an important priority for ESM.
Just as strategy should differentiate an organization from its competition, the process of strategy should never be shrink-wrapped and should allow for total integration to an organization's existing culture and planning approaches.
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