A Well-Placed Assessment – Decision-support aid for executives

Decision makers are busy. Customers, competitors and opportunities are all coming and going, and business moves fast.

Executives rarely have time to stop and evaluate the health of their organization. An assessment is a helpful tool to get an organization back on track.

A business assessment is a roadmap to bridge the gap between where your business is headed and where you want it to go. It’s a needed pause to refocus on key strategies and identify opportunities for growth, while making sure you’re moving in the right direction.

“A well-placed, well-done assessment can be the best decision support aid for any executive team to have confident direction,” says Paul Theisen, principal and founder of TAG CXO.

An assessment is a strategic planning tool that organizations use to provide decision support and gain clarity on goals and objectives.

Completing a comprehensive assessment will help inform an organization’s decision makers by identifying short and long-term goals and devising a roadmap to get there. It’s a key building block in smart decision making.

An assessment helps to:

1. Gain clarity
2. Invest wisely
3. Manage confidently

A well-placed assessment will aid business leaders in making a complex decision or set of decisions, especially within IT systems.  

When it comes to IT decisions, a thorough assessment can help refocus on an organization’s IT strategy and tactics. Often companies throw a lot of money at an IT problem and don’t get much for it, their efforts come up short.

By aligning technology for current purposes and future objectives, organizations can determine how technology plugs in today and what needs to change to reach their objectives tomorrow. A thorough, specific assessment will provide that perspective and change the outcome.

An assessment fits into the planning phase. Often organizations run right past the planning to the doing. It’s important to step back and give credence to planning and assessing.

“Assessments represent an organization’s discipline to stick to a planning phase and make sure it yields the insight they need to make better decisions in the future,” Theisen says.

There are many assessment tools available, or companies can craft their own. Popular analyses are the SWOTT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and trends – and the GPCT – goals, plans, challenges and timeline.

In “The Power of a Business Assessment on your Business Goals,” Jackie Nagel of Synnovatia says honesty is key when evaluating your business and suggests outsourcing an assessment for an unbiased perspective. Read more here

Once an assessment is in place and is providing valuable insight, repeat often, quarterly perhaps, to make sure your business is on the right track.

At TAG CXO, Theisen recently worked with a mid-market utility company to establish an assessment for their IT strategy, the results were overwhelmingly successful. Get in touch with Paul Theisen here.