The Cyber-Based View
When Tamara Schwartz began teaching international management courses at Gettysburg College, she discovered a gap in the academic literature with respect to corporate strategy that was impacting corporate leadership and Board decision making in the private sector. While Business Curriculums included the theoretical foundations of firm success as they relate to a firm’s resources and capabilities or the culture, political, legal and economic systems of the nation where a firm is based, there was very little about the cyber domain and its impacts on organizations. Newly retired from the military, where she had been working with Department of Defense leadership to understand the strategic, operational, and tactical implications of a growing cyber domain, Tamara set out to address this gap, and began to incorporate cyber strategy into her liberal arts management curriculum to prepare her students to function in an age of weaponized information.
Coming from a military background in information operations and advanced technology, the Llamrai team has a unique perspective of the interactions amongst people, process, technology and data honed over decades of experience. Experience that Tamara realized needed to be shared in order to prepare corporate leadership and future generations for operating in the world of cyber. This led her to fuse the reality of information operations with a multitude of academic theories to develop a new perspective of organizations – The Dynamic Cyber-Based View. The Dynamic Cyber-Based View has become an academic theory, but it is not an academic exercise. It is a practical approach to developing both new capabilities and defensive measures that the Llamrai team describes as Adaptive Cyber Capability.
What is Adaptive Cyber Capability?
Unlike cybersecurity, which is a tactical approach similar to building a fortress, or cyber defense, which is an operational approach similar to wearing body armor or driving a tank, adaptive cyber is strategic. Adaptive Cyber Capability allows an organization to behave like a soccer midfielder – sometimes on defense, sometimes on offense, and always changing based on where the ball and the other players are moving around the field. An adaptive cyber capability hinges on an organization’s understanding of its posture in the cyber domain – a posture characterized by the Dynamic Cyber-Based View. Cybersecurity and cyber defense are both elements of an adaptive cyber capability, but they are insufficient in and of themselves.
Strategic Planning Using a Dynamic Cyber-Based View
Cybersecurity has been mischaracterized as a technical problem to solve, but if it were only a technical problem, it would have been solved by now. Cyberthreat is proliferating due to two different phenomenon. The first, Moore’s law, sees exponential technological growth. The second is the Hacker Community of Practice – a knowledge community. At its heart, the expansion of cyberthreat is a continuous learning behavior, and cybersecurity is a problem of competitive strategic advantage. As with all competitive advantage challenges, there is a technical element to the solution, but technical approaches on their own are insufficient to achieve a strategic competitive advantage.
A great strategic plan requires thoughtful processes built on good information and a complete sense of the organization it serves. It provides vision and direction. It develops operational methods and timelines that will reach the goals established in the plan. It maximizes use of the organization’s strengths, ensures that future plans do not have an adverse impact on current programming, and adds to the value of services by focusing effort and resources. Most strategic planning consultants are highly skilled at basic strategy development; however, in information driven organizations, the capacity to build good strategy hinges on the ability to understand and work in the high tech and engineering environment, and the ability to relate the work of research and development to real world scenarios and applications.
Llamrai’s planning activities leave your organization with a plan that is innovative, flexible, and executable in a world of digitization, automation, and cyber.