I have been thinking about strategic planning given many companies have been knee deep in these recently.
Is not strategic planning an ideal thing for AI to actually do? Think about it.
The purpose of strategic planning is to prepare an organization for the future by setting goals and a process for achieving them. Now, strategic planning does not equal strategic thinking. The former is analysis, the latter is synthesis.
When you examine the typical strategic planning process, you find the data that it relies on fall into four key areas.
1. What the company/organization offering (resources & competencies)?
2. Who the company/organization serving (markets & customers)?
3. Who are the competitors (competitors)?
4. What market environment operates (laws & regulations, economics, technologies, demographics)
All of the data and insights in these areas must be captured and then synthesized into a strategy.
Clearly strategic planning required on information, and data, and then analysis and then synthesis. And to do it effectively, the first step is collating all relevant available data. However, if one examines the sheer quantity of data available for each of these areas, one realises that there more than any normal strategic planning team can analyze and synthesize, and moreover, the traditional strategic planning tools are incapable of integrating and synthesizing this amount of data.
Artificial Intelligence relies on data, big data and the more the better. And, as you can see from the previous data lists, healtcare companies have access to significant amounts of data. All data (in any format) can be combined, analysed and predictions made with far higher accuracy than what humans alone can do.
Imagine if you had an ongoing strategic planning process that was automated so not needing significant amounts of human time, highly intelligent and highly accurate in terms of growing the company results. Impossible I hear you gasp. Strategic planning takes teams months of time. Exactly.
What if I told you such a system exists?
I am reaching out to interview the team who developed it to inform you all – it is spearheaded by a Professor from Harvard. Although I have seen a lot of Artificial Intelligence in my day, this is a game changer – for those who can afford it. If you are in a small company you can stop reading about here. However, for those who can afford such a system, it will not only fix the numerous issues with the current process but saves human time and gets far better results.
Features of this AI system are:
• Fully automated and operates 24/7 without human intervention
• Instant big data import and data analysis and strategic conclusions being drawn so that instant response to market events or competitor strategies can be implemented
• Constant automated data search (the types of data will be specified by humans)
• Constant automated data currency review and update from real data so no data is ut of date
• Automatic data validity check and poor data will be cleansed or replaced
• Automatic review of data relationships
• Automated review of reasoning and conclusions
• Constant automated review of assumptions underlying strategic decisions
• Automatically prompted creation of strategic implementation plans
• Constant automated reviews of strategy implementation for results analysis and adjustment for more rapid progress
The additional capabilities they are planning on top of the ones above include the following. These are not developed yet but in planning.
• Assessing strategic thinking in manager
• Development of the managers ability to think strategically
• Gather and apply data on resources and competency
• Generate overall strategic vision
• Propose competitor focused strategies
• Analyse and propose multi-SBU portfolios and how to adjust to maximize strategic goals
• Define and recommend market segments for the organizations’ strategic attention (outside existing ones)
• Prompts for functional area sub-plans
• Suggest operational decisions for implementation
• Check for availability of resources and competencies
• Check effects of environmental factors
• Guide managers to the right strategies
• Guide understanding of internal value chain
• Guide understanding of industry value chain
• Identify value chains for strategic implementation (both low cost leadership and differentiation)
• Identify key success factors
• Quantitative assessment of strategy risks
• Recommended strategies for achieving competitive advantage
• Recommend external combination strategies
• Monitor the implementation and effectiveness of a strategy
I will let you all know when I have done that interview.
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