Headlines
Strategy Architects is a boutique consulting company based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Board & Executive Level Consulting
Strategy Architects typically works at senior executive and board level to assist in strategic decisions and demystify technology-speak to focus on key business objectives including strategy formulation, business model development and enterprise (and other) architectures.
We have a wealth of experience in rationalising systems (often after mergers and acquisitions) taking into account various factors including skills, costs, technologies, trends, intellectual property concerns etc.
We are also often asked to review software projects where results are slower than hoped, expenses higher than imagined, and early optimism has given way to frustration and anxiety. This is all too common.
Our services include:
- Strategy facilitation, formulation and review
- Goal realisation and facilitated decision making
- High-level architectural efforts including business model design and enterprise architecture efforts
- Project and organisation assessment and redesign
- Solution analysis, design and scoping, investigation (including RFI & RFP processes), evaluation and recommendation
- Innovation projects including bespoke software projects (we have met with some success in the territory/rep/sales management arena, and also in the creation of integrated dashboards and portals for pharmaceutical, financial services and project management organisations)
- Applied research
- Managed execution and oversight (where appropriate and when required)
Pragmatic and Solution Focused
While we have deep skills and experience in the IT arena, spanning a wide range of disciplines, we prefer to think of our efforts as IT informed rather than IT centric. Most of our engagements depend on critical business thinking, including a pre-technology focus on business models, processes, projects and all-important decisions spanning a wide range of factors including strategic, financial, operational, organisational, technical and social.
Our approach is underpinned of course by a view of where - and when - technology can realistically add value (and of course where it may be unnecessary or inappropriate). Complexity and risk - if properly understood - necessitate different responses and approaches, and we aim to equip our clients to deal with these challenges in a considered and informed fashion.
Strategy Architects maintains strong academic ties, and our principals continue to lecture, at MBA and executive level, and conduct research relevant to our interests and our clients' needs. Our offerings though are overwhelmingly practical and pragmatic rather than being in any way academically directed (but they are academically informed and solidly grounded, to the clear benefit of our clients and their projects).
The use of advanced decision facilitation techniques, including the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), has been well received on a variety of our projects and we have developed rich skills in their application to aid understanding, stimulate discussion, expose areas of conflict or contention, and arrive at richer, better informed, more defensible decisions.