Some business tools are so simple, it’s easy to be suspect of their effectiveness. RACI, a responsibility and decision clarification matrix that brings both structure and accountability to projects and processes, is one of them.

All roads lead to data. Or rather, when it comes to insightful decision-making, optimizing operations, reducing costs, and outperforming competitors, all roads lead with data.

There is broad agreement that the U.S. healthcare market has structural challenges that need correcting: Cost of healthcare is the highest in the world and has been growing faster than GDP for decades. So, what should a healthcare provider, payer, or services and technology company do to win in this evolving landscape? How should a healthcare player develop its call-to-action?

Too often when companies embark on a strategic plan, the results are disappointing. A common error involves assembling a long-term business plan, calling it a strategic plan, and complaining about how the exercise is mostly ‘financial,’ with limited use beyond the one-time rollup.  So, what’s causing these frequent unsatisfactory results?

Strategy is all about choice. At its foundation, business strategy comes down to decisive prioritization of what your organization will and won’t do in order to achieve its desired goals and outcomes. Landing on the choices and priorities that underpin any strategy requires insights inherently formed by a number of factors including the integration of competitive intelligence, which in our experience is often neglected or even discredited.

Beyond upgrading and reducing redundancies of an IT Infrastructure that is outdated, incorporating any (or all, if appropriate) of our recommended foundational areas into your IT infrastructure-layer strategy promises greater agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and security, while also helping your business deliver on its down-selected imperatives.

Let’s assume you’ve worked through your strategic imperatives with decisive prioritization, calling out what you clearly will and will not invest in for the next 12-18 months, as part of your 3-year (+) aspirations. From those few decisive strategic imperatives, you have an execution mandate for both in-year initiatives and multi-year executions. Typically, at least a portion of those imperatives requires significant changes or new processes within your operations.

Newly merged cultures have the very real potential to negatively impact employee morale, stymie collaboration, and far worse, diminish the quality of employee interactions with customers, vendors, and others outside the organization, impacting business results. So why is merging corporate cultures more challenging today than it’s ever been?

In his 2 part article, HPA Senior Advisor, Alex Nesbitt, explores the inherent complexities of roll-up mergers and discusses potential solutions to drive value in one of the most successful business growth models historically.
Part 1: Why Roll-Ups Succeed or Fail
Part 2: Secrets to Success in Industry Roll-Ups

HPA Senior Advisor Alex Nesbitt’s valuable insight on extension mergers continues. Read Part 2 here.