Augmented strategy - the future of strategic planning
Augmentation today
Technological advances in augmented reality (AR) have led to products that inform, entertain, and engage audiences of all ages. Augmented reality uses information about the current physical reality. AR puts this important digital information directly in the environment of the physical world, thus taking it one step further.
Companies have introduced augmented reality into their marketing, products, and customer experience strategies and other areas of operational processes are following. The process of creating and evaluating company strategies remains a blind spot for augmentation.
What about strategy processes?
Looking at current and historic strategy processes, augmentation of context-relevant information has always been around. Most of the time, the augmentation was a manual activity. So, companies relied on the involved people, their access to information, their experience to augment the right information for strategy decisions.
Manual activities and solely relying on the involved people introduces chances of error, bias and noise into strategy processes. Looking at the impact of strategy decisions, this situation is not acceptable. Ways for better, automated augmentation of the right information instantly is desperately needed to lower the chance of error, to avoid bias and noise in strategy decisions.
You can view automated augmentation as an intelligent assistant that provides data, scenarios, help at the right time, provides answers backed by the available data and uses machine learning, data analytics and scenario evaluation.
Example
Say, you set a strategic goal to grow your company revenue by 15 percent each year for the upcoming five years. The augmented information will include e.g.:
An evaluation of the company´s ability to grow revenue by the required growth rate (what market share would be needed, how does the competition grow, how does the company´s headcount have to grow to reach the goal, can we increase prices over time),
An evaluation and prediction how the competition and the market could evolve (prediction of the growth of competitors and the market, potential shift of market shares, impact of new entrants on market shares),
A likelihood of reaching the goal under the current circumstances as well as under different scenarios for changes in the company and in the market (can we grow even more? Should we hire more people, should we partner to speed up growth),
A prediction of the economic situation over the next five years with different economic growth scenarios and the impact on the company´s growth.
Summary
Augmenting strategy creation automatically is an important step forward to enable positive change in strategy creation processes. Automated augmentation lowers efforts of manual data search and manual data preparation and reduces the chance or manually introducing error, bias and noise.
