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Businesses already have tools to support strategic planning to lower cost, increase quality, and decrease time to market. Agility is another, albeit new and different, factor that proactive managers will use in designing the future of their organizations. A central issue is how to create a strategy that has the most beneficial balance of agility with other qualities. Such decisions have a life cycle. And at the end of the planning life cycle, we have the situation where a strategy has been created. The questions are what decisions are the correct ones to support that strategy, to attain the desired agility. Our agility metrics support this end of strategic planning.

Developing an innovative business strategy is difficult. Very difficult. However, the most difficult part awaits you at execution time. Often, you will find that your fantastic idea fails. Not because this idea was unrealistic, but because it was unrealistic for your company.

A successful campaign to save 100,000 lives shows that efforts to make it easier for organizations to innovate can yield remarkable results.

After 15+ years of deploying more and more tools, we need to ask ourselves - why haven't organizations realized the level of breakthrough collaboration necessary for them to excel - or in some cases, survive? It's not that the industry has not had any "wins" with collaboration strategies but success always seems to be stubbornly limited to certain groups or business units. Improving collaboration, it seems, has become an "intractable opportunity.

If you follow the logic laid out by historians such as the late Alfred Chandler, who wrote classics like Scale and Scope and Strategy and Structure, companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale. The experience curve nicely represents this relationship: The bigger a company gets, the more experience it accumulates, and the more its performance--particularly cost performance--improves.

I'm on a mission to help marketing catch up with the realities of today, and one of the areas I believe still requires some attention is the way businesses focus on their customers. Or in modern day jargon, how far they are "customer centric". Sure, by now we know that focusing on the customer can help you grow sales, build loyalty and even get customers to recommend you to others. There are even a growing number of people that deploy the Net Promoter Score or similar metrics as a tool to achieve just that.

I rarely come across leaders who advocate wholesale organizational redesign or use it as a way to support their people and business. When organizational strategy changes, structures, roles, and functions should be realigned with the new objectives. This doesn't always happen, with the result that responsibilities can be overlooked, staffing can be inappropriate, and people - and even functions - can work against each other.

"This isn't a "shock & awe" title to merely draw you in. This also isn't a blanket claim from an "expert" who has never been in the trenches that "social business is dead". Enterprise 2.0 (aka social business) is not dead. Significant progress continues to be made. More and more enterprises have social business strategies and efforts for both marketing & internal collaboration. However, enterprises with several years of Enterprise 2.0 efforts under their belt have failed to reach the tipping point and cross into mainstream adoption of social collaboration . Coincidentally, Dion Hinchcliffe recently noted in The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business, the existence of the fissure with older collaborative channels on one side and the option to voluntarily engage socially on the other. I believe this is a sign post that we must pay attention to and make adjustments or social business could fall deeply into the rabbit hole where knowledge management (KM) efforts of past, already reside. "

"Over the weekend my friend and industry colleague JP Rangaswami wrote an insightful post that pondered how we have gone about delivering on customer experiences as connected to our back-end capabilities. Specifically, he explored an issue that is increasingly challenging many of the large-company CIOs I speak with these days: That the present rates of change demanded of the accumulation of 20-30 years of legacy business systems is greatly exceeding the ability of our enterprises and associated software "stacks" to deliver on them, particularly as cloud, social, and mobile dramatically transform computing today. "

"Thomas Frey is a futurist. It's his job to predict the future by identifying emerging global trends. What Frey does might sound a little like fortune telling but spotting new trends is an important way of ensuring your business is well positioned for the future. Frey spoke to SmartCompany from the United States ahead of his upcoming visit to Australia for the Ci2012 conference. Here are his seven predictions for the future:"

"Our fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance."

In order to really achieve great things, we sometimes have to take a step back. We have to reconsider our options. Great things rarely come naturally. They are planned. The same goes in the social enterprise.

Companies are using more Web 2.0 tools and technologies than they were last year, sometimes for more complex business purposes, according to McKinsey's second annual survey on Web 2.0. Companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

Traditional design professionals who want to apply their methodologies to organizational systems change and business strategy should be prepared for a diversity of responses from organizational managers. Some will welcome your unique perspective and experiences, your creative problem-solving and communication skills, and your willingness to work collaboratively across disciplines. However, you also need to prepare for the possibility of disdain, confusion, and resistance from others.

"Transforming the Enterprise As We Know It"