“Pattern Based Strategy”: Making sense of leading business indicators

As businesses emerge from the recession, questions also emerge around IT and business strategy, with organizations looking for new ways to gain competitive advantage. At Gartner, we believe there is a new IT value model that demands the attention of global business and IT leaders.

This new model is about implementing a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed “weak” signals, that form patterns in the marketplace—and to exploit them for competitive advantage. We call this new model Pattern-Based Strategy.

In addition to a strategic framework, technology is an essential component of a Pattern-Based Strategy. This new model will require both existing and new 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.

A Pattern-Based Strategy will allow an organization to not only better understand what's happening now in terms of demand, but also to detect leading indicators of change, and to identify and quantify risks emerging from new patterns rather than continuing to focus on lagging indicators of performance. A Pattern-Based Strategy also provides a framework for execution—connecting the activity of seeking and modeling impacts of patterns directly to executing with measurable results.