{"id":5564,"date":"2013-04-20T13:02:45","date_gmt":"2013-04-20T13:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=5564"},"modified":"2013-04-20T13:02:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-20T13:02:45","slug":"strategic-progamming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/strategic-progamming\/","title":{"rendered":"Strategic Progamming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last 40-odd years, a branch of Artificial Intelligence called AI Planning has developed.\u00a0 One way to view Planning is as automated computer programming:\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Write a program that takes as input an initial state, a final state (&#8220;a\u00a0goal&#8221;), and a collection of possible atomic actions, and \u00a0produces as output another computer programme comprising a combination of the actions (&#8220;a plan&#8221;) guaranteed to take us from the initial state to the final state.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A prototypical example is robot motion:\u00a0 Given an initial position (e.g., here), a means of locomotion (e.g., the robot can walk), and a desired end-position (e.g., over there), AI Planning seeks to empower the robot to develop a plan to walk from here to over there.\u00a0\u00a0 If some or all the actions are non-deterministic, or if there are other possibly intervening effects in the world, then the &#8220;guaranteed&#8221; modality may be replaced by a &#8220;likely&#8221; modality.\u00a0<br \/>\nAnother way to view Planning is in contrast to Scheduling:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Scheduling<\/strong> is the orderly arrangement of a collection of tasks guranteed to achieve some goal from some initial state, when we know in advance the initial state, the goal state, and the tasks.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Planning<\/strong> is the identification and orderly arrangement of tasks guranteed to achieve some goal from some initial state, when we know in advance the initial state, the goal state, but we don&#8217;t yet know the tasks;\u00a0\u00a0we only know in advance the atomic actions from which tasks may be constructed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Relating these ideas to my business experience, I realized that a large swathe of complex planning activities in large companies involves something at a higher level\u00a0of abstraction.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mintzberg.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Henry Mintzberg<\/a> called these activities &#8220;Strategic Programming&#8221;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Strategic Programming<\/strong> is the identification and priorization of a finite collection of programs or plans, given an initial state, a set of desirable end-states or objectives (possibly conflicting).\u00a0 A program comprises an ordered collection of tasks, and these tasks and their ordering we may or may not know in advance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Examples abound in complex business domains.\u00a0\u00a0 You wake up one morning to find yourself the owner of a national mobile telecommunications licence, and with funds to launch a network.\u00a0 You have to buy the necessary equipment and deploy and connect it, in order to provide your new mobile network.\u00a0\u00a0 Your first decision is where to provide coverage:\u00a0 you could aim to provide nationwide coverage, and not open your service to the public until the network has been installed and connected nationwide.\u00a0 This is the strategy Orange adopted when launching PCS services in mainland Britain in 1994.\u00a0\u00a0 One downside of waiting till you&#8217;ve covered the nation before selling any service to customers is that revenues are delayed.\u00a0<br \/>\nAnother downside is that a competitor may launch service before you, and that happened to Orange:\u00a0 Mercury One2One (as it then was)\u00a0offered service to the public in 1993, when they had only covered the area around London.\u00a0\u00a0 The upside of that strategy for One2One was early\u00a0revenues.\u00a0 The downside was that customers could not use their phones outside the island of coverage, essentially inside the M25 ring-road.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For some customer segments, wide-area or nationwide coverage may not be very important, so an early launch may be appropriate if those customer segments are being targeted.\u00a0 But an early launch won&#8217;t help customers\u00a0who need wider-area coverage, and &#8211; unless\u00a0marketing communications are handled carefully &#8211; the early launch may position the network operator in the minds of such customers as\u00a0permanently providing inadequate service.\u00a0\u00a0 The expectations of both current target customers and customers who are not currently targets need to be explicitly managed to avoid such mis-perceptions.<br \/>\nIn this example, the different coverage rollout strategies ended up at the same place eventually, with both networks providing nationwide coverage.\u00a0 But the two operators took different paths to that same end-state.\u00a0\u00a0 How to identify, compare, prioritize, and select-between these different paths is the very stuff of marketing and business strategy, ie, of strategic programming.\u00a0 It is why business decision-making is often very complex and often intellectually very demanding.\u00a0\u00a0 Let no one say (as academics are wont to do) that decision-making in business is a\u00a0doddle. \u00a0 Everything is always more complicated than it looks from outside, and identifying and choosing-between alternative programs is among the most complex of decision-making activities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last 40-odd years, a branch of Artificial Intelligence called AI Planning has developed.\u00a0 One way to view Planning is as automated computer programming:\u00a0 Write a program that takes as input an initial state, a final state (&#8220;a\u00a0goal&#8221;), and a collection of possible atomic actions, and \u00a0produces as output another computer programme comprising a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,23,28,40,47,49,62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-decision-theory","category-forecasting","category-joint-action-society","category-market-planning","category-marketing-strategy","category-planning","p1","y2013","m04","d20","h13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}