SAP Business Objects Influencer Summit: Strategy to execution

SAP is presenting the Business Objects Influencer Summit, an invitation-only event being held today in Boston. "Strategy to execution" is a key theme across the many numerous presentations.

The following diagram gives an overview of this concept. Note the role of insight as driver for making smart business decisions:

Drilling down further, SAP fleshes out the linkage between an organization's underlying business strategy and the operational steps required to execute business decisions:

Robert Kaplan, guiding light behind both activity-based costing and the balanced scorecard concept, provided professorial gravitas:

Kaplan offered his perspective on the strategy to execution concept, which he calls as "linking strategy and operations." Although cut off from the image, Kaplan presents five steps, starting from the upper-right and proceeding counter-clockwise:

Another key theme is crossing "the information divide." Through Business Objects, SAP seeks to extend its reach across both technical and non-technical users:

These themes sound great at a high-level but the devil is in the details. I'm particularly looking forward to learning how these concepts carry forth to IT execution and reducing rates of IT project failure.

For a more...pointed...perspective, see Dennis Howlett's comments on today's Summit.

[To see more presentation pictures click here.]