Vendor Strategists: Time To Revisit Your Corporate Strategy And Your Management Portfolio

The current recession clearly showed at many companies how fundamental issues with corporate strategy can lead to a savage reality, affecting corporate stability in a big way. Strategists have started fighting back with a constant stream of ad hoc decision-making support around cost cutting and corporate restructuring. Clearly, many vendor strategists underestimated just how disconnected the core elements of their strategy framework are from the daily realities in their companies. Forrester's recent survey of vendor strategists aimed in particular at strategists' views on corporate strategy frameworks, resulting in an in-depth analysis of how they are leveraging their management portfolio from cost analysis to core competency and social networks. We found that strategists are primarily struggling in setting the underlying mission and strategy for achieving their corporate vision and that their company's strategic focus is on the customer for only about 60%. Going forward, strategists should put more emphasis on innovating their management portfolio beyond internally-centric paradigms and models, while developing dedicated technologies for helping them in that endeavor.