Two Paths, One Road
Steve Price and Dave Robinson went to school together, joining the same large engineering company after leaving. But by the time they were in their early twenties their careers had gone in very different directions.
Steve Price
Steve moved to Australia and pursued a corporate career. He worked for Wesfarmers for 14 years at the Business Unit CEO level, then spent 4 years for ASX200 listed Fleetwood as the Group CEO.
Over that time, Steve recognised the established systems for running organisations - annual strategic planning, annual budgets, annual performance appraisals, etc. were being undermined by the pace of change.
Dave Robinson
After a spell in the Oil & Gas sector, Dave retrained and started a career in the digital space, first at the University of Aberdeen then with a large agency. He initially worked on creating e-learning for training medics before moving into the creation of web applications.
In 2003 Dave started his own digital agency which now employs 10 people and continues to thrive despite his attentions now being directed at Alertise.
Alertise
After Steve left Fleetwood in 2014 he reconnected with Dave and did some strategy work for Dave's agency.
This made Steve curious about how the agency operated. He saw how the agile methodology they used encouraged the rapid development of ideas and allowed them to pivot when things changed. A seed was sown.
A Perfect Storm
Around the same time as Steve was doing the strategy work for Dave's agency, he was engaged by the Board of Australia’s largest co-operative to advise them on their use of Strategic Planning.
The work matched Steve's skills, but he could see the problems the organisations were facing, something a strategic plan alone would not solve.
As with many businesses who create strategic plans, the co-operative had issues aligning the plan with tasks that would deliver it. Also, the plan had limited flexibility, it was a moment in time document that couldn't respond to a rapidly changing world.
Alertise Was Born
Steve realised that not-for-profit organisations were poorly equipped to benefit from strategic planning and that this problem needed a solution.
Alertise was registered in 2015. Co-founded by Steve & Dave the name is an abbreviation of 'Alert Information Sharing Environment'. It was inspired by what appears to be the parting words of the expert on Strategic Planning – John Argenti (ref. book Practical Corporate Planning 1989).
"Finally comes the monitoring process, the importance of which should not be underestimated. Not only does it permit the team to follow the progress of their strategies; and provide a mechanism for 'alerting' them when the strategies require revision, it also tells them when to restart the entire corporate planning process again – hopefully not for several years.
The monitoring phase is something else as well. It is not just the final stepping stone in the corporate planning process, it is also the first in the next stage to 'strategic management' where a team of executives continually act as corporate planners for their organization, constantly scanning the environment for new trends and events, continually thinking about the long-term future direction for their organization."
Fast Forward 5 Years
Alertise is now used by many organisations in the not-for-profit sector. It provides a single platform for setting out strategies and projects, provides ease of access to key performance indicators and allows leadership teams to collaborate at all levels across the organisation. In the words of one customer, "Before Alertise, running our organisation felt like flying at night, in the clouds with no instruments."
Let's talk about how our journey can help you with yours.