Sketch your strategy around patterns: Gartner

MUMBAI, INDIA: The economic environment rapidly emerging from the recession will force business leaders to look at their opportunities for growth, competitive differentiation, and cost controls in a new way.

A Pattern-Based Strategy will help leaders harness and drive change, rather than simply react to it, according to Gartner, Inc.

As a press release further explains, a Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek, model and
adapt to leading indicators, often-termed "weak" signals that form patterns in the marketplace. Not only will leading organizations excel at identifying new patterns and exploiting them for competitive advantage, but their own
innovation will create new patterns of change within the marketplace that will force others to react.

"Most enterprises and governments today are so invested in traditional processes and thinking that they can't hear or sense new signals," said Val Scriber, group vice president of Research at Gartner. "Many are not even trying to identify signals of change. If they are, they are unable to get executives to pay attention, model the impact, or discuss how their organization must adapt. The few organizations that are seeking and modeling new patterns continue to struggle to get their people, processes and information to adapt in ways that drive a measurable business outcome."

"It's not enough to just seek changes in social, economic, political and environmental landscapes," said Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Organizations need a way to evaluate what
they are hearing and act appropriately. They also need to seek patterns, not just from information, but also in activities of people, such as the collective on social media platforms."

Pattern-Based Strategy requires both existing and new technologies. There are existing technologies that will continue to evolve - business intelligence, rules-based engines, performance management, service-oriented
architecture, business process management, recommendation engines, etc. A Pattern-Based Strategy will also require integration of these existing technologies and the emergence of new or enhanced technologies: those that
identify patterns of change to indicate opportunity or risk, those that model the effects on the enterprise and those that enable an organization to consistently adapt to these patterns and drive measurable results.