Data Gathering
To prepare for designing strategy, it is helpful to 'take stock' of what you know about your customers, your markets, your competitors and your business, and to search out what you don't know or may be unclear about. By sorting this out in advance, you can make more efficient use of the time you dedicate to the strategy design process. You can also ensure that you separate fact from opinion—attending to both, but taking into account these differences.
Organizations encounter several problems in pulling such information together, including
- gathering reams of data that cause the 'messages' to get lost in the details
- obtaining information from various sources, each of which is just enough different to make comparisons difficult
- overlooking gaps that make history and projections tough to interpret
Through a data gathering process, you follow a straightforward approach for sorting through and sifting out critical background information on how you currently define your business and how it is affected by the circumstances in your industry, the external environment overall, your products and markets, your customers, your competitors and your own internal situation.
You also develop an approach for contacting, collecting and reporting information from a representative sample of customer
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