Executive Education Program

ANALYZE   PRIORITIZE   LEAD   STABILIZE  

AI-assisted strategy and portfolio analysis
Human-led strategic analysis, powered by the ALIGN Method

A one-day executive program on using AI to create evidence-based, traceable, and defensible strategy-to-portfolio decisions.

Duration: 1 day (open enrollment); 2 days (in-house), the second day applied to the participant’s own analysis

Format: In-person; open enrollment or in-house. Groups of 10 to 15. Not recorded. Tool- and vendor-neutral.

Target audiences

• CIO
• Strategy analysts and consultants

• Heads of strategy and corporate development
• Heads of portfolio and investment management
• PMO leader at group or division level
• Lead enterprise architects

Problem and relevance
An AI model produces a strategy analysis in five minutes that reads well. It names the right frameworks, writes fluently, and reaches recommendations that sound plausible. The flaw does not show on reading. It shows when someone on a committee asks where a figure came from, or why this recommendation follows from that finding. A direct query loses four safeguards: source verification, protection against false convergence, plausibility checking, and traceability. This course teaches a procedure that withstands that moment, and then carries the strategic result through to the IT portfolio.

Learning outcomes and benefits

What you will take away 

• The four safeguards a direct query loses: source verification, protection against false convergence, plausibility checking, and traceability
• Why five framework results placed side by side are not yet agreement, and how the frameworks connect into one system
• The two ways evidence enters an analysis — selected and restructured versus passed through unchanged — and why the distinction carries liability
• The chain from a strategic finding through goals and capability gaps to a roadmap element

What you will be able to do

• Build an evidence base that stays separated from interpretation
• Lead five strategic frameworks as one connected system, in the order in which they build on one another
• Attribute and document what came from the human and what from the machine
• Derive IT goals, capability gaps, and prioritized project proposals from a strategic statement, and record them in the IT Alignment Canvas
• Cross-check a result across two independent models, and review an AI-assisted analysis submitted by others to name where it does not hold

Topics and content

One day in two halves: the morning covers strategy analysis, the afternoon carries the result into the IT portfolio. Both work on the same case: a listed industrial company under price pressure, analyzed from real sources.

The plausible error

• A direct query on the case, live in the room
• The four break points that follow
• What a fluent result hides

Five tools, one system

• The connection instead of the individual frameworks
• Resource-based view and value disciplines, introduced just before use
• Reading five results as a system, not a list

Evidence base and attribution

• Separating fact-gathering from interpretation
• The two ways evidence enters the analysis
• The attribution protocol

From finding to recommendation

• The traceability table
• Effort–impact matrix
• Cross-check across two independent models

Goal extraction and capability gaps

• From strategic result to business and IT goals
• Current versus target state
• The IT Alignment Canvas as working tool

From gap to project proposal

• Proposal template
• Scoring model and gates
• Priority levels, regulatory precedence, dependencies

End-to-end traceability

• The chain run backwards: from a roadmap element to the figure in the annual report
• Why this step makes the value of the whole procedure visible

Methods
Roughly 40 percent presentation to 60 percent participant activity 

• Live demonstration on the case, in real time, with visible failure
• Guided exercise on the participant’s own machine, step by step
• Pairs working with two models: the cross-check is itself the exercise form — one side’s result is challenged by the other
• Plenary review after each exercise, focused on what was not found
• Peer exchange as an opener: participants first surface how their own organisation validates AI output today, before the procedure is introduced

The distinctive approach

• Analysis with AI, not strategy for AI. A procedure that holds up when a committee questions a figure, not a prompt collection.
• The ALIGN method, published in Strategic Analysis in Practice (2026) and tested against a real-world case study through independent expert review; both underlying publications are provided to participants.
• Reaches a role no comparable course addresses: people who assess analyses rather than produce them.

Prerequisites

• Experience with strategic analysis or portfolio work at a level of responsibility
• PESTEL, Five Forces, and SWOT assumed as known; resource-based view and value disciplines are introduced in the course, no prior knowledge required
• Basic familiarity with a language model (no technical knowledge or prompting experience needed); own laptop with access to two different models, or willingness to work in pairs

Course lead: Dr. Christof Gellweiler, author of the IT Alignment Guide V2 and Strategic Analysis in Practice; 30 years in IT and transformation.

Scheduling and delivery: Via selected seminar providers. In-house on request.