Businesses are feeling the pressures of a constantly changing marketplace and are experiencing difficulties differentiating their products or services in the intensified competition of this environment. Many companies have lost focus of the reason for their existence in this turbulent environment. Businesses that neglect creating a true customer focus will feel the unnecessary high costs of poor service through the active word of mouth of dissatisfied customers and increasingly expensive advertising and marketing to attract new customers.

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning. In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determines where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan".