Business Strategy Unit

Strategy Management

Align IT Infrastructure and Applications with Strategic Business Objectives.

Disconnects between evolving business and IT architectures are costly. More than half of IT projects in progress either underserve or no longer comply with business objectives. This is especially true in companies when a new line of business is added, or a merger or consolidation occurs. Most organizations can spend up to 70% of current IT budgets just maintaining systems. Understanding discretionary and non-discretionary spending is critical to properly support the business drivers within your current IT budget. Anexinet's Strategy Management approach fulfills the most critical and often overlooked first step toward synchronizing an organization's business systems with business objectives. The purpose is to help align your IT investments with the business objectives they support.
12-Week Process

Ensure up to 36 months of IT relevance, value, and confidence. A comprehensive, highly structured, 12-week program administered by Anexinet's Strategy Management experts leads to a Systems Strategy Roadmap to remove uncertainty from your IT projects before committing additional software and technology services.

Strategy Management:

* Refocuses IT spending to address implications of evolving business requirements and planned change initiatives
* Aligns and prioritizes your enterprise project portfolio to accelerate support toward strategic business objectives
* Stipulates a clear business case for project initiatives and outcomes
* Helps IT and business unit managers to work in synergy toward common goals

Anexinet Strategy Management Approach

Systems Strategy Work Plan

Anexinet Strategy Management starts with a high-level Work Plan that provides a flexible and repeatable framework for achieving client objectives from both Business and IT perspectives. The Plan serves as the basis for IT applications rationale and roadmap development, and guides the Strategy Management initiative along three distinct paths:

    * IT Roadmap: Anexinet focuses on understanding the client's organization as a whole, then works with the client to develop a set of Business and IT Architectures, project plans with credible cost estimates, and migration plans that will deliver the highest degree of probability for aligning IT systems with business objectives.

    * Portfolio Recovery: Anexinet works with the client to assess, understand, and regain control or to close any languishing projects.

    * Spend Analysis: Anexinet works with the client to move non-discretionary IT spending to the discretionary-spending side of the client's balance sheet. The goal is to enable the client's IT spend to do more with less.

Conceive Stage

The Conceive stage is where the important work of creating a vision and developing a strategy is accomplished.

Checkered Flag

This is usually carried out by executive / senior management and as supported by more junior staff.

A typical set of deliverables or products from this stage are:

    * Corporate Vision
    * Mission Statement
    * Scenario Reviews
    * Corporate Strategy
    * Business Unit Strategies (if applicable)
    * Stakeholder Communique

Bulls EyeRemember, although we aren’t majoring on it here, you normally DO NEED a cogent vision and strategy in place prior to beginning to build a business architecture. Otherwise, for what purpose and on whose authority are you going to be building it?

The business architecture is a ‘translation layer’ between corporate vision & strategy and execution, NOT something to be done for its own sake!

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Management Team

The operational structure of Belgacom is based on four pillars:

* The Enterprise Business Unit of Belgacom Group fulfills the ICT needs of national and international professional clients.
* Private clients are served in the Consumer Business Unit.
* The networks and the IT services are housed in a central unit: Service Delivery Engine.
* Staff & Support groups together all of the transversal functions which support the Group´s activities.

Seven Stages of Internet Marketing

Corporate strategy addresses the interrelationship between the various business units in a firm, including decisions about which units should be kept, sold, or augmented. Business-unit strategy focuses on how a particular unit in the company attacks a market to gain competitive advantage.

Stage Two: Framing the Market Opportunity

Stage two entails the analysis of market opportunities and an initial first pass of the business concept—that is, collecting sufficient online and offline data to establish the burden of proof of opportunity assessment.

Figure 6: Stages of Internet Marketing

Stage Three: Formulating the Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing strategy is based upon corporate, business-unit, and overall marketing strategies of the firm. The marketing strategy goals, resources, and sequencing of actions must be tightly aligned with the business-unit strategy. Finally, the overall marketing strategy comprises both offline and online marketing activities.

Stage Four: Designing the Customer Experience

Firms must understand the type of customer experience that needs to be delivered to meet the market opportunity. The experience should correlate with the firm’s positioning and marketing strategy. Thus, the design of the customer experience constitutes a bridge between the high-level marketing strategy (step three) and the marketing program tactics (step five).

Stage Five: Designing the Marketing Program

Stage five entails designing a particular combination of marketing actions (termed levers) to move target customers from awareness to commitment. The framework used to accomplish this task is the Marketspace Matrix. The Internet marketer has six classes of levers (e.g., pricing, community) that can be used to create target customer awareness, exploration, and commitment to the firm’s offering.

Stage Six: Crafting the Customer Interface

The Internet has shifted the locus of the exchange from the Marketplace (i.e., face-to-face interaction) to the Marketspace (i.e., screen-to-face interaction). The key difference is that the nature of the exchange relationship is now mediated by a technology interface. This interface can be a desktop PC, subnotebook, personal digital assistant, mobile phone, wireless applications protocol (WAP) device, or other Internet-enabled appliance.

Stage Seven: Evaluating the Marketing Program

This last stage involves the evaluation of the overall Internet marketing program. This includes a balanced focus on both customer and financial metrics. It emphasizes customer actions as well as financial metrics used to track the success of marketing programs.

Marketing Planning and Strategy

Marketing Planning and Strategy is designed for courses at the junior/senior-level in marketing strategy, business unit strategy analysis, strategic market planning, marketing planning, strategic marketing management and advanced marketing. It focuses on building the strategic skills necessary to compete in the global economy by using a variety of analytical frameworks to understand how companies formulate strategy, make strategic decisions, and how they implement strategy. This text focuses on marketing strategy from the viewpoint of the business unit and clearly distinguishes marketing strategy frommarketing management.

International strategy

A group as diverse as FirstRand cannot be replicated in any one country. Therefore we have a 'rifle shot' approach to international expansion. We are a "Rand Specialist" and we do not have a specific target for off-shore income which we wish to achieve. More importantly our off-shore strategy is driven at business unit level but prioritised and co-ordinated at the center. Any proposed off-shore expansion must have a strategic fit with the business unit's domestic strategy and the business unit expanding overseas must be able to demonstrate a substantial competitive advantage.