Pulse - key issues of your business today

Information feeds

Feed devices like watches and polls let you choose knowledge sources and automate the information feed flows you want to receive. This will provide real-time information about news and changes to keep your business insight up to date. Or you can choose the timing of the alerts. The players in the knowledge net can also put information feeds in the system themselves. These information feeds are original “raw feeds” without further enrichment. A basic level of business insight can be gained through notifying information feeds, but this alone is not enough.

Our greatest challenge related to strategy work is processing, conceptualization, and drawing conclusions from the information.

Gatekeepers

The initiator, or in other words, the person who has set the watch, activated the poll or started a new conversation, will be the moderator of the information feed until it is shared or ends up being removed. Saturated insight feeds can’t hang around forever in a feed stream. Gatekeepers identify important issues by initiating information feeds while system players help to rate the importance of the feeds. Weighting can be set by players based on their position. After all, a gatekeeper or feed ranking determines the destiny of the feed. Gatekeepers have a good understanding of the issues they are watching and they may be set as responsible for certain focus areas. Gatekeepers also act also as filters and classifiers, so that only relevant information reaches the right receivers in the right context, to avoid information overflow. An information receiver needs to have an adequate and relevant knowledge background to be able to recreate new meaningful knowledge from information gathered.

Insight feeds

An enriched information feed becomes an insight feed. These enrichments may be written comments, thumbs-up symbols, filters such as opportunities, technological trends, product lines, functional units, etc. Internal filters then determine the right context. As more enriched information is added to the feed, i.e. knowledge content, the more “knowledgeable” and “insightful” it will be. The ultimate purpose of the insight feeds is to create strategic business foresight with a focus on the future, looking back only for learning purposes.

SWOT and Scenario -topics

A topic is the glue that bundles pieces of information together under a brief summary which will be used further on in the process. Qualified feeds enter SWOT sessions as available background information and the members of the sessions (e.g. the Management Team) will discuss the feed stream. As result of this process, the feeds will:

• be bundled with other feeds
• be scrutinized by strategic learning devices
• immediately become a SWOT topic
• be classified as irrelevant and removed if required

There may be several sessions at SWOT level e.g. Sales, Management Team-, product line-, etc. Specified context for the session defines the purpose.

Strategic learning devices

For a more multi-faceted understanding, insight feeds or bundles of insight feeds can be scrutinized from different points of view by utilizing strategic learning devices. In fact, strategic learning devices (e.g. Product-Market Matrix, Competitor Benchmark, Blue Ocean Value Curves, Five Forces, Growth-Share Matrix and Business Model Canvas) are perspectives with visual frameworks. Feeds or feed bundles with filters, classifications and other enrichments emerge automatically in and via the strategic learning devices. They facilitate virtual, online and social learning processes of session members. Based on dialogues and increased understanding, session members will summarize the conclusions to create a SWOT topic.

SWOT- online

SWOT summarizes the most important business issues that require immediate attention, the creation of tasks and strategic actions. Business foresight can be further refined with the best possible future scenarios. Ongoing information feeds with online communication and learning without time-consuming, detached strategic analysis projects, ensure you’re ready to make strategic decisions and take action on a continuous basis. This is a new way to bypass detached, slow analyses, as well as your competitors! You simply rate the SWOT topics with your team to keep the SWOT analysis up to date.