The basic principles of traditional strategy are wrong according to Hagel:
— Develop a detailed strategy before moving to operational implementation.
— Focus on a one to five year time horizon to develop robust strategies.
— Pursue a portfolio approach to business initiatives to cope with growing uncertainty.
— Strategy is a specialized discipline that needs to be pursued by experts.
Hagel is proposing Fast Strategy, in which diminishes the importance of this assumptions in exchange for a more robust framework for incremental innovation. This is very coherent with my last post and the following questions before to embark in an ERP, which is a major project in any company:
1. List the purposes for buying an ERP, could be obvious but bounce it back again. Your ERP must run in accordance with strategy and plans.
2. List your weakness and compare with the demos to see objectively how much they differ. Remember that change management is one of the most difficult parts of this project.
3. List the basic high-level procedures that are key for your business model. Compare with the ERP process and do not think they could be better: Why change something that has made you successful for something everyone uses.
4. List the cost of the areas you are more concerned; propose from the start to make a proposal for analytics project beginning in these areas.
5. What are the key values of your corporate culture? Are they in the processes you are going to change? How much do you care?
6. What areas need to have common procedures? For this areas could use standard and proven methods as a way to negotiate with the organization. What areas need to be in collaboration, exchange transactions, information, and collaboration functions to a broad business community?
7. What areas need to be free of a structure to be more productive, pursue opportunities proactively, use enterprise services architecture to improve process standardization, efficiency, and adaptability.I have seen for this post so many posts with questions that I did not want to repeat. Amost of the questions address the feasibility of the project from the technical and economical point of view. I rather take the approach of asking the business model or strategic questions as the main reason to implement such a big project.