A strategic management system (SMS) is important for the agility and longterm success of any organization. It is a comprehensive and integrated set of activities and mechanisms that links strategy formulation and planning with operational execution1 and acts as the foundation for all key decisions. Its importance is all the more critical in today’s highly competitive and disruptive environment, where 50 to 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail2 and where the life expectancy of organizations is in a serious decline. Yet, despite all that has been learned since the launch of the business strategy revolution in the 1960s, most organizations are still having difficulties building and perfecting such a system. The objective of this article is to provide guidance to help organizations in this effort so they can map an agile future.
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To remain competitive in today’s marketplace, organizations have no choice but to transform themselves relentlessly, and at a faster and faster pace. However, leading organizational transformations and reaping the expected benefits is not easy. Indeed, recent surveys show that between 50% and 90% of executives are dissatisfied with their organization’s ability to transform themselves. This article proposes a holistic framework incorporating an ensemble of both proven (e.g., strategic planning) and leading-edge (e.g., business architecture approach) practices to address this important problem. This framework is designed to tackle the 12 most common root causes of the difficulties organizations face during their transformations.
Most organizations have yet to integrate the Business Architecture Approach (BAA) in their strategic planning approach. In most cases, this is due to a lack of knowledge about this new approach. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap and demonstrate that BAA is an important part of modern strategic planning. To do so, we: demonstrate that the main purposes of BAA are a subset of those of strategic planning; demonstrate that BAA helps organizations better achieve this subset of purposes; and clear two important misconceptions about BAA.
The objective of this paper is to answer the following question: Does the use of the business architecture approach enable organizations to improve their performance? To do so, this question is broken into four sub-questions that have already been answered by researchers and practitioners in the fields of strategy and business architecture. By combining these answers, we can conclude that the business architecture approach, when tightly integrated to the organization’s strategy management activities and mechanisms, does improve firm performance.
Since the 1990s, the importance of agility in the success of organizations has gradually come into the spotlight. As a result, more and more organizations are striving to increase their agility. This article serves as a foundation for a series of upcoming articles aimed at helping organizations in these efforts. Its purpose is to identify and clarify the nature of the four dimensions of business agility.