Mapping the main strategic choices normally requires some degree of analysis and systematization of a company’s business environment. Strategic dimensions concept is an extremely helpful instrument in bringing structure and order into the chaos of everyday business operation. Eventually, using this approach allows to get an insightful high-level view of the existing strategic alternatives, as well as understand the company’s current position in relation to these alternatives. Here I define strategic dimensions, discuss their types, and show some cases of practical use in a separate article (see here).
Definition
In the broad sense a strategic dimension is an axis along which you assemble several closely related business choices. These choices represent the major decisions companies make about production, distribution, customer segments, technology, etc. It is useful to apply some degree of classification to grouping these choices, e.g. separate decisions on products from decisions on technology used.
This is the general, so to say more theoretical, definition. However, it is better to show an example. For instance, one of the standard strategic dimensions is products. In order to create a products (or services) dimension adapted to your company just name several typical product groups or products that are produced by your company or by the industry your company is working at. See an example for FoodTech here.
Types
There are several types of strategic dimensions. In general practitioners in strategic consulting name five or six of the most universally used strategic dimensions. These are:
- products;
- clients or customers;
- technology;
- value chain;
- monetization type;
- geography.
All of these standard strategic dimensions are quite self evident. For example, the technology dimension is a line-up of the most widely used and/or crucial technologies that a company or industry uses in its business cycle.
Furthermore, every company or industry has some specific dimensions that can be applied only to its peculiar business operations. Finding and filling with possible options these non-standard dimensions are the hardest but the most exciting tasks for any strategic project.
Additional aspects to consider
One more aspect of strategic dimensions is the the level of detail or specificity for each dimension. With the example on products, you can have several levels of this dimension. On the highest level are product groups (broadly defined). On the second level, there is more detail: like product types or series. On the third most detailed level you can have individual products or the variations of the same product including color, weight or some other specifications. Hence, choose what level of detail is required and create several sub-dimensions as needed.
Moreover, in general the specific points along the dimensions are put without particular order. At the same time, for some products or for some specific tasks you could actually rank and arrange the dimension points along the axis. Arranging can be done by amount, or intensity, or some other quantity, quantity attribute. For example, the growing difficulty of production or the next stages in the value chain, or the level of technology required.
All in all, a strategic dimension is a line on which the major relevant and close options of the one aspect of business are arranged. There are standard and non-standard strategic dimensions. More characteristics to consider are the detail of each dimension as well as rank and order of strategic options included.
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