Services: Strategy

Business Challenge

A financial services NGO wanted to develop the ability to monitor, assess, and respond to external developments in the overseas markets in which it provided credit, financing, and had significant operations.  Despite having access to substantial information on its foreign markets from a wide variety of sources, the organization lacked a process for determining which events carried real implications for its business, and for assessing the severity of external developments and responding accordingly.

Approach

Outward Insights helped the organization build a strategic early warning process that leveraged its existing access to relevant information, and introduced tools and methods that improved the efficiency of information monitoring and that added structured analytic techniques to help the NGO determine the significance of overseas events.  We started by meeting individually with managers responsible for recommending strategic responses to overseas market conditions to gain an understanding of those plausible future events that would represent a true threat to their business.  We then helped a small team of intelligence analysts build a threat framework so that they could immediately evaluate the relevance of market developments as they occurred and determine their implications.  We then introduced tools for early warning indicator analysis and communication.

Results

The organization today is able to quickly craft strategic responses to warning alerts regarding external developments that represent true threats to the organization’s services and operations.  Outward Insights helped the organization’s intelligence team improve the sophistication, relevance, and value of warning assessments that the team sent to the organization’s top managers.  It has also improved the efficiency of its information monitoring, and is able to focus on particular pieces of information that are truly diagnostic in helping determine whether a strategic response to an external development is warranted.