Business Process Management and the Balanced Scorecard: Using Processes as Strategic Drivers

Chapter 3. The Strategic Process

Chapter 2 presented the premise that organizations can leverage process performance for strategic gain. This chapter provides an overview and explanation of the strategic process, building a bridge to the discussion of how to develop a proper strategy that leverages process performance.

The Strategic Process Flowchart

There are dozens of ways to approach the development of strategy. While on a detail level there can be significant differences, most methods focus on a flow of steps as shown in Exhibit 3.1.

Figure 3.1. The Strategic Process

Each step will be examined, and a brief explanation of what it is about and why it is part of the process will be provided.

Vision and Mission

The vision and mission step is one of the most important and least understood. Referencing five different books on strategic planning can commonly yield five different explanations of what mission and vision statements are and what they are supposed to accomplish. (A scary proposition since it implies that the writers, who are supposedly experts on the subject, cannot even agree!) Simple user-friendly definitions are as follows:

• A vision statement should articulate the ideal future state of the organization. In other words, if you are successful in driving the organization in the desired direction, what will it look like when you get there?

• A mission statement describes what the organization ...