We define strategic agility as your ability as a business to identify and move across new modes and channels of trade. This ability is key to evolving the business to stay relevant to your target customer and ultimately to deliver growth.

What are the key ingredients for strategic agility? Our experience identifies three main aspects. Information, Execution and the oft misunderstood Master Data.

Information acts as the rudder, keeps the ship on course and allows relevant changes of direction as facts become clearer. Information in this context is not reporting, nor data but delivery of specific metrics which measure success. The discipline of information here includes planning, for what use is a metric without an answer to the “what if” question that it raises?

Execution of course is crucial. Infrastructure which can scale, processes which can be reused, and people with clear support and knowledge frameworks provide the heart of getting the job done, on schedule at the best cost.

Master Data which is rarely elevated to the level of strategic agility, continues to grow in importance. We see in Master Data and the disciplines of its management an equal asset to information and execution. The very framework that good information depends upon is master data. The common description of products, suppliers, customers, locations, prices and many other parts of the internal and external organisation is critical to the quality of decisions that can be made. In equal measure the ability to take core processes and reuse them in new scenarios demands that master data is implemented to describe the new relationship that should be executed.

Take some time to analyse these three key ingredients before making your next investment decision. If any of the three are out of balance then we expect to find compromises are being made in your strategic agility with impacts on the top line, the bottom line and the customer.