While it is has become an established practice for large companies of reasonable maturity to view their strategic initiatives across a number of horizons, smaller businesses often do not have the luxury of CSO’s or Programme Managers to look after their strategy execution.
Today, all technology companies run a lean operation. Smaller businesses find themselves frustrated at not being able to execute on anything other than their H1 initiatives for the simple reason that everyone designated to work on H2 projects gets pulled back into the crisis and urgent work. For this reason companies of this size need someone that’s not tied up with day to day work. Someone with experience covering product management, technology strategy, and project/program delivery methodologies [venn diagram]. Inevitably this person will come from outside of the company.
There is no *real* strategy, just a wishful list of things to be done over the coming months.
There is no consensus, or desire to walk away from revenue-generating work that falls outside of the companies stated strategy. (this is incredibly common, because most companies get to where they are via a path they didn’t entirely predict)
- “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do” Michael Porter.
- “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1000 things” Steve Jobs.
There is no structure through which to execute, or the
proposed structure lives outside of the existing company execution framework.
Some of the technologies in the ISP and Operator space that require attention now but will start to deliver business value in 18 – 24 months are:
NFV, SDN and their associated Orchestration tools, with a specific focus on ETSI OSM currently.
Up until recently, Software Defined <Whatever> seems to have evaded the networking world, or more specifically, the dominant networking equipment vendors. Planes that land on autopilot, autonomous cars, etc yet IP networks are still overwhelmingly configured by humans via the command line.
This is now finally showing signs of changing, and there’s a whole new generation of applications, tools and frameworks to take advantage of this.
Previous engagements include: NFV-based product development; Managed Services solutions architecture; Consulting on Public Wifi / Ad-server architectures
Horizon 2 strategy execution
what does that even mean?
Terms coined from ‘The Alchemy of Growth’ by Baghai, Coley and White
Horizon 1 refers to Extending and defending the core business in the short term,
Horizon 2 to Building emerging businesses in the medium term, and
Horizon 3 to Creating viable options for the long term.
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