Landscape impacts on your strategies

The PESTLE framework has become a standard approach in analyzing the external landscape of the organization. By understanding how the political, economic, social, technology, legislation, and environmental factors all impact your strategic direction, you’ll be in a better position to meet or excel in the challenging new circumstances.

The Wizsm Landscape Impact workflow is built around analytics that work with known management approaches, such as PESTLE. Wizsm brings both a semantic and a quantitative view of external impacts on strategic direction. The workflow begins with organizing what we know about the external environment and then linking that semantically with strategic statements and typical characteristics such as impact, importance, risk level and so on.

To determine what is known about the external ecosystem of the business, PESTLE looks at 6 key areas. Briefly these PESTLE components are:

• P – Political – What are the political situations that affect your organization and what type of impacts do they have?
• E – Economic – What economic factors are you most concerned with?
• S – Social - What social trends are most important to your organization?
• T – Technology – What technologies are you most exposed to that determine the direction of your products and services?
• L - Legislative - What new laws or regulations are you concerned with?
• E – Environment – What environmental changes or concerns help or hinder your organization?

Organization often add one or two more factors to the PESTLE perspective. These factors may have specific meaning in their industry or organization. We have found two more factors useful for most organizations and have added them to the workflow:

• M – What are the markets of interest to your organization?
• B – What issues do business executives think are important today?

Understanding the relationships between the PESTLE factors allows you to assess the impacts of changes in one factor on other factors. Having these cross impacts at your fingertips makes assessing the importance and impact of the PESTLE factors more meaningful. Once these components are determined, Wizsm goes to work using quantitative and semantic analytics to evaluate the impact, uncover opportunities, and then prioritize the perspectives.