IT Tools for Strategic Foresight Benchmarking

Together with the FH Upper Austria, we are currently conducting a study that aims to create a first market overview of IT tools for strategic foresight.

Fachhochschule OberösterreichThe market is still very diverse and includes tools that originated from idea management, big data mining, systems thinking, enterprise 2.0 and trend research. With this study we want to contribute to the development of the field by providing structure and a first assessment of functionalities. As secondary objective is to provide guidance to organizations that seek to buy such tools to support their strategic foresight activities.

The benchmarking study is organized along three phases:

  • In the first phase we evaluate the tools on the basis of publicly available information (product descriptions, test versions, etc.).
  • In the second phase we run interviews with the tool providers, where we discuss with them our preliminary assessment and where possible discuss demo or test versions of the tool.
  • In the third phase we validate our findings with an expert panel consisting of industry experts, who apply IT tools and academics.

The benchmarking exercised utilizes 36 criteria along three dimensions:

  • Product features
  • Software quality ISO/IEC 9126-1 standards
  • Procurement options

If you have tools which you can recommend to be included in our sample we would love to hear from you.

Dr. René Rohrbeck, Associate Professor of Strategy, Aarhus University

Dr. Fiona Schweitzer, Professor, FH Upper Austria

Abdullah Farag, MSc. student, FH Upper Austria

 

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