These diversions will cause delays and can even lead to dead ends unless the organisation can avoid them. Similarly, organisations may come across new roads (new business opportunities) that were not on the map when the journey started. They may discover that taking advantage of these roads can enable them to reach their destination sooner than anticipated.

Finally, like directional signs and mile markers, the forecast tells an organisation whether it is heading in the intended direction and where it will end up unless it takes immediate action. The enterprise must monitor position and make adjustments constantly. Occasionally it may need to make a major detour - sometimes even heading in what seems to be the wrong direction - to achieve its final objective.

By taking note of the signs - the projected forecasts - and using judgment based on experience, business leaders can make intelligent adjustments to the plan. These adjustments will not be just a once-a-year activity. They may become necessary at any time to keep on track toward the intended destination.

Strategic planning, budgeting, forecasting and monitoring actuals are all part of the same process - moving an organisation towards its objective. Together, they are essential components in the implementation and execution of strategy. When performed in isolation, however, they provide little value.

Quite often, managers are asked to budget using systems that do not allow them to see the strategic plan or latest forecast. It is like asking someone to drive down the road with only partial sight, no map, and no idea of the final destination. To drive performance, the company needs to see the whole travel plan: objective, strategic plan, forecast, actuals and budget. These elements are all part of the same process.

This journey, or performance management process, is continuous. Markets and competitors do not remain motionless to accommodate an organisation's annual planning process. Travelling down this road smoothly and staying on course, like driving a car, requires regular, small adjustments.

Unfortunately, the traditional systems that support planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting are inflexible. Each component is isolated from the others. In addition, often each piece of the process is supported by a different technology than the others, causing integration problems.

For example, the strategic plan may be presented as a text document; the budget may be prepared in a spreadsheet; actual results may be reported in the general ledger and analyses may be performed using an online analytical processing (OLAP) tool. These systems are completely disjointed, manually intensive and error-prone. As a result, they help create the strategy gap.

In addition, these systems tend to suffer from other problems that also create gaps:

Difficult to change. Most existing management systems do not allow changes to be made easily. Altering structures, accounts and basic assumptions so that management can quickly see the impact of change is complex and time consuming.

Sadly, most systems are nothing short of glorified adding machines - and they do not even do this very well.

Reporting problems. Systems tend to report from one perspective - usually accounts down the page, and time and version across the page, with each page representing a cost centre. Viewing data by product, turnover, geography or any other business perspective - such as strategy and tactic - is extremely difficult. In addition, many systems require a great deal of effort to disseminate actuals, the latest forecast and strategy information throughout the organisation. These difficulties prevent the detailed analysis of budgets, forecasts and actual results in context and can result in the approval of unrealistic plans.

File management issues. Many organisations still rely on spreadsheets for preparing budgets and reporting results. While spreadsheets are great personal productivity tools, they are a nightmare when used as a corporate planning and reporting system. In addition to flexibility and reporting problems already discussed, spreadsheets and many other file-based systems also incur version control and other problems because multiple files have to be maintained, relinked and then redistributed. Apart from the time and error-prone nature of this task, you can never be sure that users are now using the right version.