Strategy execution management

Strategy execution management is the discipline of turning a formulated strategy into delivered outcomes: decomposing objectives into goals and initiatives, assigning owners, connecting them to the processes and resources that do the work, and tracking progress against targets. As a software category it covers the tools that hold that chain — objectives, initiatives, portfolios, indicators — in one governed place, replacing the slide deck where the plan lives and the spreadsheet where its tracking dies. Gartner frames the same outcome as strategy realization, one of the major use cases of the digital twin of an organization.

The separating question in this category is what feeds the tracking. A strategy tool fed by monthly manual updates measures the discipline of the people updating it; one whose indicators are computed over the operational records of the processes that execute the plan measures the plan. The second kind can answer, on any given day, whether an initiative is on track — which is the question the category exists to answer.