Be cool

Want to make better decisions with your business?

Then Naples-based StratTech might be able to help. The company, a member of the Naples Accelerator in Collier County, was recently named a Gartner 2017 Cool Vendor for Project Portfolio Management. StratTech's decision-analysis software tools essentially combine social and behavioral sciences with the nitty-gritty of planning and accounting.

“In a nutshell, we provide a way to mitigate risks both professional and business,” StratTech Managing Director Bruce Ellis says. “Secondly, through our modeling and simulation we provide a means to stress test a strategy or implementation plan prior to significant capital or resource expenditures.”

Acceptance of that offer is hardly universal — one of the company's biggest challenges.

“Our biggest competition is the status quo,” Ellis tells Coffee Talk, pointing to chief information officers and other executives who overlook the value in changing how they assess strengths and weaknesses of their strategies. StratTech's business model is software-as-a-service.

The Gartner cool designation goes to technology companies that standout globally for disruptive capability or opportunity. In hunting down cool, Gartner, a technology research and consulting firm, based in Connecticut but with a large office in Fort Myers, also seeks smaller vendors not often visible in the market.

StratTech earns its disruptive tag and thus its cool by giving project managers “living business models” that let them visualize, measure and gauge the impact of strategy and implementation decisions, Gartner analyst Donna Fitzgerald says in a report.

The work of StratTech's Ellis and partners Frederick Kautz and Kim Warren, based in Boston and London, respectively, represents “a significant shift from static strategy frameworks,” Fitzgerald adds. “System dynamics modeling is a tool for the future, and StratTech opens a window toward understanding its power.”

StratTech has a variety of clients, some from Global Fortune 1,000 companies. “We also work with the smaller divisions of larger companies,” says Ellis, a Naples and London resident who operated Ellis Strategy Group out of Atlanta and London for more than 12 years. He merged that company into StratTech Consulting, which he incorporated last year in Naples.

Demand for StratTech services has increased in the past five years, but Ellis laments dynamic system modeling is still not used as widely as he thinks it should be. Exposure from Gartner could change that. “We expect our demand will jump significantly in the year because of the Gartner exposure,” Ellis says.