What is a Strategic Intelligence Platform?

When it comes to strategic decision-making, the age-old wisdom of “quality over quantity” holds more weight than ever. With data overload becoming an increasing issue, sorting through heaps of information to find what’s truly valuable for strategic decisions can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.  

The rapid market and business changes don’t help either — errors are now more costly than ever. A single misstep in data application can lead you to make the wrong strategic bet and set you back months, leaving your workforce distracted on the wrong initiatives while your competition is pulling ahead, eroding your competitive edge. 

Therefore, having the correct data on hand is no longer enough — you must also apply it promptly. This is why savvy leaders are turning to Strategic Intelligence Platforms, enabling timely decision-making while safeguarding businesses from error-prone human errors. 

But what exactly are Strategic Intelligence Platforms? 

This article breaks it down for you, covering: 

• What is strategic intelligence 
• Types of data used for strategic intelligence 
• What a Strategic Intelligence Platform is 
• Capabilities of Strategic Intelligence Platforms 
• How a Strategic Intelligence Platform supports strategy management 
• The benefits of using a Strategic Intelligence Platform 

We must first define strategic intelligence to understand what a strategy intelligence platform does. 

Strategic intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing, and applying strategic insights to business decisions. It uses internal and external data to formulate, inform, execute, and evaluate strategic decisions and their implementation. 

The goal of collecting and using strategic intelligence is to help your business cultivate and maintain a competitive edge, ensuring its sustainability amid business and market jolts. 

While strategic intelligence may resemble the contextual application of typical strategic tools such as SWOT or PESTLE analysis, it goes one step above these, with a key difference being the timeliness of data. While data derived from traditional strategic tools are static and fixed, strategic business intelligence is rooted in real-time, evolving insights. These are applied to overcome challenges and seize opportunities proactively. 

“Accurate corporate decision-making requires the integration of research, corporate objectives, competitive intelligence, and the coordination of resources to make it work.” 

– Jack Welch, former head of GE  

Types of data used for strategic intelligence

Strategic business intelligence combines various sources and data types to inform actionable business insights. These data types include: 

• Business performance: Data reflecting your past and current business performance, including critical business KPIs, progress against strategic objectives, and operational effectiveness 
• Resources and competencies: Data that’s related to your business’s internal strengths and assets, including your workforce, technological infrastructure, financial resources, and intellectual property 
• Customers and markets: Data that identifies opportunities and challenges within the market, including customer preferences, behaviors, purchasing patterns, and market segmentation 
• Competitors and industries: Data that helps you identify threats, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities, including competitor strategies, offers, market positioning, and price points, as well as industry developments 
• Environmental factors: Data that helps you account for potential risks and changes, including economic conditions, political landscapes, socio-cultural trends, and technological advancements 

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, let’s look at what makes up a Strategic Intelligence Platform. 

A Strategic Intelligence Platform combines data and technology to generate valuable business insights, automate tasks, and streamline workflows across the strategy management cycle. It provides strategy-specific applications to support each phase of strategy management — strategy development, strategy execution, and strategy evaluations — weaving these together to ensure seamless transitions across the strategy management process.  

The best Strategic Intelligence Platforms offer a comprehensive set of capabilities, including: 

• AI tailored to strategy which analyzes vast amounts of data representing the context of the business, identifies patterns, and generates actionable insights to forecast trends, assess risks, and derive optimal strategic decisions 
• Extensive data connectivity which integrates internal and external data sources for a prompt and complete understanding of your business environment 
• Digital collaboration which allows stakeholders to communicate effectively across business units, departments, geographical locations, and time zones 
• Flexible workflows that accommodate diverse stakeholders needs while enabling adaptive strategic pivots in line with internal and external business or market changes  
• Advanced data analytics and forecasting which derive deeper insights from business data by analyzing historical performance, current performance, emerging trends, and simulating scenarios 
• Integration with work systems which embed strategic initiatives and data into existing work systems to ensure alignment between strategic objectives, daily operations, and strategic execution throughout the organization 
• Safety and security which ensures strategic data is confidential, protected against unauthorized access, data breaches, and intellectual property threats through encryption protocols, access controls, and compliance measures  

Strategic Intelligence Platforms help you bridge the three stages of strategy management, carrying data throughout and across strategy development, execution, and evaluation to navigate the strategy management process seamlessly. In doing so, rapidly and an on ongoing basis, a Strategic Intelligence Platform drastically reduces the time to value on strategic initiatives. It also empowers companies to have an agile approach to strategy rather than a delayed waterfall that doesn’t enable them to adapt to market shifts. 

Let’s explore some specific use cases and applications of these capabilities below. 

Strategy development 

• Insight crunching: The platform's data connectivity and AI capabilities bring together and decipher large datasets of structured and unstructured data. This accelerates the strategic analysis typically undertaken by humans, shortening it from months or weeks to minutes. When a shift happens in the market, you don’t need to wait a couple of weeks for the analysts to come through with a snapshot and insights to support an eventual decision. You get answers and strategic recommendations there and then. 
• Strategy formulation: AI capabilities can help gather diverse stakeholder perspectives to ensure viewpoints align while bringing discrepancies to light. Digital collaboration tools (e.g., whiteboards, comments, reactions) further allow stakeholders to communicate in real time, enabling quick strategy formulation and refinement with additional support from AI-powered action plans and insights. Gone are the days of having to wait for everyone to be available to sit in a room. 
• Risk analysis: Advanced data analytics combined with ongoing performance evaluations and AI forecasting allow you to proactively identify risks and develop subsequent mitigation plans depending on risk assessments. For example, the strategy development application part of Quantive StrategyAI lets you evaluate the threat levels of risks identified by the solution, outlining their likelihood and potential severity to ensure you prioritizing accordingly. You get a comprehensive overview of the risks, no longer need to guess their likelihood, and have a clear view of how to mitigate threats. 

Strategy execution 

• Actionable goals: Flexible workflows allow you to create goals that contribute to strategic priorities, ensuring daily efforts move the needle. As an example, Quantive StrategyAI provides core strategy execution capabilities to strengthen organizational alignment. It provides AI assistance when setting goals, ensuring that everyone in the organization can craft measurable and actionable goals that drive visible progress toward strategic objectives. 
• Progress tracking: Data connectivity drives real-time, transparent progress tracking, providing stakeholders with timely information on your strategy to keep them engaged and ready for proactive adjustments throughout the execution process. This also brings the benefit of dramatically reducing the administrative burden on staff, making your strategy truly measurable, all the time. 
• Streamlined processes: Integrations with existing work systems keep strategy top-of-mind for everyone in your business. By ensuring that strategic work is seamlessly connected to the day-to-day operations and to the systems that staff use, you reduce context switching, and empower your teams to contribute via the tools and processes they use every day. 
• Task automation: Adaptive workflows eliminate tedious repetition in execution, freeing up time and headspace for strategic decisions through automated tasks and alerts. 

Strategy evaluation 

• Real-time analysis of results: Advanced data analytics can pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t, empowering you to optimize resource use and drive effective business action. As an example, Quantive StrategyAI uses pattern matching and artificial intelligence to automatically correlate the progress on strategic goals to KPIs, as well as to signal what KPIs are driving the behaviour (positive or negative) of others. So that executives can assess in minutes the impact of strategic decisions and direct resources toward the best possible outcomes. 
• Forecasts: Machine learning-powered predictions use real-time data to alert you of possible threats and opportunities, ensuring you’re never caught off guard. This empowers you to course-correct ahead of time. 
• Recommendations for next steps: Custom workflows can trigger automatic corrective actions, while AI can keep you informed by identifying the root cause of specific results and outcomes.  

Strategic Intelligence Platforms steer businesses away from outdated, one-and-done, and slow approaches to strategy. Their seamless support for each phase of the strategy management cycle creates smooth transitions, promoting an actionable, interconnected, and cyclical approach. As a result, improving insight generation and strategic agility to facilitate smooth transitions between each stage of strategy management. 

By linking all strategy management components and ensuring daily business efforts link to strategic priorities, Strategic Intelligence Platforms eliminate the strategy-execution gap typically brought on by disconnected teams, systems, and processes. 

As a result, they nurture what we at Quantive call the Always-On Strategy: A dynamic approach that emphasizes continuous adaptation and responsiveness to real-time market changes, looping strategy development, execution, and evaluation to refine and continuously align your strategy to market demands. 

Discover the power of an Always-On Strategy 

As a result of its capabilities — and these trickling down into specific use cases for each stage of the strategy management cycle — a strategy intelligence platform is highly beneficial for businesses.  

Some key benefits offered by Strategic Intelligence Platforms include: 

• Real-time internal and external insights fuelling prompt, holistic strategic decision-making and anticipating potential disruptions 
• Alignment and accountability based on a steadfast vision, collaborative planning tools, and real-time tracking ensuring all levels of the organization work together to achieve desired outcomes 
• Risk management with up-to-date insights detecting threats and vulnerabilities  
• Timeliness with continuous evaluation and forecasting enabling swift strategic redirects in line with market conditions 
• Employee engagement with actionable data empowering employees at every level to make informed decisions that effectively contribute to organizational objectives 
• Efficiency with streamlined strategic management making productivity a breeze by automating tasks and reducing the time spent on manual strategic planning 
• Sustained competitive advantage by embedding agility, continuous improvement, and innovation into the organization’s operative foundations 

Choosing the right Strategic Intelligence Platform isn’t just about staying competitive — it’s about thriving in the face of constant change. Yet, not all strategic business intelligence platforms are created equal. Your business needs the right platform to keep pace with market shifts and empower you to shape strategies that set you apart.   

This is where Quantive StrategyAI comes in.  

Quantive StrategyAI – equipped with extensive data connectivity, digital collaboration, AI-powered contextual analysis, strategy frameworks, and risk detection, among many other capabilities – streamlines end-to-end strategy management in line with present realities. From creating responsive strategies to executing and evaluating radical changes, Quantive StrategyAI is your platform to drive alignment to outcomes, embrace agility, and quickly realize value faster and more reliably from your strategic decisions.  

Want to know more? See how Quantive StrategyAI helps you create a sustainable market edge. 

Quantive empowers modern organizations to turn their ambitions into reality through strategic agility. It's where strategy, teams, and data come together to drive effective decision-making, streamline execution, and maximize performance.   

As your company navigates today’s competitive landscape, you need an Always-On Strategy to continuously bridge the gap between current and desired business outcomes. Quantive brings together the technology, expertise, and passion to transform your strategy from a static plan to a feedback-driven engine for growth.   

Whether you’re a visionary start-up, a mid-market business looking to conquer, or a large enterprise facing disruption, Quantive keeps you ahead — every step of the way. For more information, visit www.quantive.com.