The economic environment rapidly emerging from the recession will force business leaders to look at their opportunities for growth, competitive differentiation, and cost controls in a new way. A Pattern-Based Strategy will help leaders harness and drive change, rather than simply react to it, according to Gartner, Inc.

A Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed "weak" signals that form patterns in the marketplace. Not only will leading organizations excel at identifying new patterns and exploiting them for competitive advantage, but their own innovation will create new patterns of change within the marketplace that will force others to react.

"Most enterprises and governments today are so invested in traditional processes and thinking that they can't hear or sense new signals," said Val Sribar, group vice president of Research at Gartner. "Many are not even trying to identify signals of change. If they are, they are unable to get executives to pay attention, model the impact, or discuss how their organization must adapt. The few organizations that are seeking and modeling new patterns continue to struggle to get their people, processes and information to adapt in ways that drive a measurable business outcome."

"It's not enough to just seek changes in social, economic, political and environmental landscapes," said Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Organizations need a way to evaluate what they are hearing and act appropriately. They also need to seek patterns, not just from information, but also in activities of people, such as the collective on social media platforms."

Pattern-Based Strategy requires both existing and new technologies. There are existing technologies that will continue to evolve — business intelligence, rules-based engines, performance management, service-oriented architecture, business process management, recommendation engines, etc. A Pattern-Based Strategy will also require integration of these existing technologies and the emergence of new or enhanced 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 and drive measurable results.

A CONTINUOUS CYCLE: SEEK, MODEL AND ADAPT

Most business strategy approaches have long emphasized the need to seek better information and insights to inform strategic decisions and the need for scenario planning and robust organizational change management. Few have connected this activity directly to the execution of successful business outcomes. According to Gartner, successful organizations can achieve this by establishing the following disciplines and proactively using technology to enable each of these activities:

Seeking in new ways and beyond traditional places — Business and IT leaders have historically focused on information that exists within traditional, well-structured sources — usually reinforcing what they already know and validating their current strategic direction. But to ignore new patterns that form from weak signals, or to misclassify stronger signals to fit within the norms of a current business strategy, risks losing sight of exceptions that provide valuable leading indicators of market changes.

"To get beyond the type of seeking they may have performed in the past, organizations must break down traditional silos of information to proactively seek signals across existing and emerging sources of information," said Mr. Sribar. "This will enable business and IT leaders to identify, characterize and assess patterns that both support and contradict existing strategy and operations assumptions."

Modeling for pattern analysis — Once new patterns are detected or created, business and IT leaders must use collaborative processes, such as scenario planning, to discuss the potential significance, impact and timing of them on the organization's strategy and business operations. The purpose of modeling is to determine which patterns represent great potential or risk to the organization by qualifying and quantifying the impact.

"Successful organizations will focus their pattern-seeking activities on areas that are most important to their organization," said Ms. Genovese. "Using models to do scenario planning will be critical to fact-based decisions and the transparency of the result."

Adapting to capture the benefits — Identifying a pattern of change and qualifying the potential impact are meaningless without the ability to adapt and execute to a successful business outcome. Business and IT leaders must adapt strategy, operations and their people's behaviors decisively to capture the benefits of new patterns with a consistent and repeatable response that is focused on results.

According to Mr. Sribar, the ways that Amazon and Netflix apply recommendation engines are examples of organizations leveraging Pattern-Based Strategy concepts. These companies seek new patterns in behavior as customers browse and purchase. Amazon and Netflix evolve their customer models dynamically in order to adapt promotions as the customer navigates through the site. In many cases, this has led to increased revenue through cross-selling and upselling, as well as higher customer loyalty. Most importantly, the results of various adaptations are fed back into how recommendations seek new patterns and model potential future adaptations.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy." The report is available on Gartner's website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=1117912&subref=simplesearch. The research explores the factors, approaches and technologies that can enable business and IT leaders to implement a Pattern-Based Strategy.

Ms. Genovese and other analysts will host a number of sessions examining various aspects of Pattern-Based Strategy at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, October 18-22, in Orlando, Florida. A sample of some of these sessions focused on Pattern-Based Strategy is available at http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/sym19/webpages/SearchAgendaAndPrograms.aspx?searchText=pattern-based.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the industry's largest and most important annual gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world's leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers. Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of attendees' annual planning efforts. They rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use IT to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency.

Members of the media can register for the event by contacting Christy Pettey at christy.pettey@gartner.com.

Upcoming dates and locations for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo include:
October 18-22, Orlando, Florida: www.gartner.com/us/symposium
November 2-5, Cannes, France: www.gartner.com/eu/symposium
November 11-13, Tokyo, Japan: www.gartner.com/jp/symposium
November 17-19, Sydney Australia: www.gartner.com/au/symposium

About Gartner

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. Gartner delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. From CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies, to business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises and professional services firms, to technology investors, Gartner is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, Gartner works with every client to research, analyze and interpret the business of IT within the context of their individual role. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 4,000 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.