Mapping Strategy with Windows Workflow

(C) 2008 Aaron L. Richards - All Rights Reserved

Richards Media Net LLC - Great Opportunities for Media Technology

In my current MBA course, we are studying strategy and tactics. One of my fellow students, Tony had posted a response to the instructor’s question concerning the essential components for the strategic management process.

After reading Tony's posting, it just occurred to me that strategy formulation both parallels and is targeted in the software envisioning & design realm.

Software, like strategy is designed to accomplish a goal or goals. Both software and strategy may specify many different tasks which need to occur in order to accomplish the goal. Some of these tasks to accomplish a strategy or successful software offering are obvious and easy to implement. Other issues are difficult to understand and identify, much less lend themselves to successful implementation. Often, both strategy and software need to interface to other systems: financial, management, point of purchase, education and training, operations, human resources, IT, technical, data/databases, paper-based systems. They need effective orchestration, they need oversight when first implemented, and they need feedback on how they are doing so that changes/revisions can be made to enhance their performance into the future.

Like Tony's post suggests 10%-50% of strategy implementations are successful, similar to the success rate of software implementations (however you define success). For the successful strategies and software, once it has been effective and reached its goals, you either build on it, or rip and replace and start again to achieve different goals.

This brings me to process graphing tools such as Windows Workflow Foundation. If a large number of your companies' functional units are computerized, you could map out a strategy using a process graphing tool (I would say that definable and repeatable strategies are processes) and control both the development of a strategy, as well as the tactical implementation of it simply by graphing it out in a drawing program. Not only that, but if your internal and external environmental analysis could be "digitized" or turned into computer digital data, then it would be possible not only to develop and implement strategy through drawing process flows, but it should be possible to model it before implementation, to see the "what-ifs" or what the result of implementation would be, to determine whether or not it should be implemented, or if there may be effects that were not foreseen in the development of these process flows.Obviously this would take quite a bit of advanced modeling technology, as well as the "digitizing" of information into an analyzable and modelable format. This type of eStrategitizing may be 5 to 10 years out, but I could see it happening. Maybe not for every industry, but for industries that are data-intensive, digitally connected and computer driven.

A vision from a man who grew up in the Internet Age, writes computer software and develops Internet systems for a living, and has visions of the future that keep him up at insane hours of the night.