ClearPoint Next: The Future of Strategy Execution

Hi, everyone and welcome. I'm Ted Jackson, one of the founders of clearpoint Strategy, and I'm joined by Angel O, our product manager. Today we're going to talk about how the strategy leader's role is transforming and how technology, especially AI, is making it easier to execute strategy faster and with greater clarity.

Exactly. If you're a strategy or performance leader, you've probably felt the pressure to deliver insights faster, align your organization and make reporting more engaging, all while doing more with less. Today we'll show you how clearpoint NEXT makes that easier than ever.

Let's be honest, executing strategy is hard, not because people don't care. It's because the process itself works against you. You have to gather data from a dozen sources, structure it consistently, make a report, and then somehow get everyone to read and react appropriately.

And every one of those steps can take hours or weeks. You're chasing updates in Excel, manually formatting charts and struggling to get a consistent message across departments.

That's exactly the process we've set out to fix with clearpoint. And with clearpoint Next, we've taken it to another level. Today we'll walk you through how NEXT helps you gather, structure and communicate your strategy seamlessly.

Let's start with gathering data. Over to you, Ted.

This is one of the trickiest things to do in an organization. Strategic Data is owned by many people in different departments and they all think about their data differently. They also don't appreciate being pestered to update their data each month or each quarter.

Clearpoint Next gives you multiple ways to automate updates. First, we have workflows. Admins can very quickly and easily create step by step workflows that remind people when updates are due and track submissions. Let me show you how that works. So we're now over in clearpoint Next and I wanted to walk you all through the process of selecting setting up a workflow, which is super easy for our admins. So from this page all you need to do is hit this plus button and we already have that Q3 review set up behind this. So let's go ahead and set up an example like a Q4 review. Once you name your workflow, it's as simple as using these drop downs below and you can select which parts of your strategy you'll be reporting out on. So we'll just select this top level scorecard here. You can also select which reporting period you're updating. In this case, It'll be that Q4 review again. So we'll look for December 25th and finally you can set the dates which this workflow is kicked off and ended. So all the time period which all your end users need to make their updates within. So we'll make sure that kicks off right after Q4 finishes and we'll run for the duration of January. So that would be a super quick and easy example of setting up a workflow. But since we already have that Q3 review set up behind this one, let's go ahead and cancel and check out some additional features. We've updated our workflows to make it easier to visualize the process of reporting. You can get a summary view and visuals on updates, and even set up and review email reminders to go to the individuals responsible for making the updates. Let's see what that looks like for this Q3 review. Once you've clicked into this summary view, you can check out all of the different users which tasks they're assigned and see the completion and progress that you're making through the workflow. You can also switch over to your workflow emails and preview all the emails that you've set up and also add in some more and make changes from here.

This is cool and looks easier to manage in clearpoint Next than the classic version. But what about end users? How are they supposed to know what.

To do from an end user perspective? You see your tasks directly on the workspaces page and you can make your changes right on the page. Let's go to a workspace and check out the My Updates pod for this user. So in this My Updates pod I can see that same Q3 review with all the instructions that the admin has left for all of the end users to see. And finally we also see all those tasks that I own as the user that I'm currently logged in as. We can jump right into any incomplete tasks like revenue by clicking right into them. Once you've entered a workflow, you'll have access again to the same instructions that your admin has left and set up for you, along with a couple other details to make sure that you're equipped with the right context to make your updates. And once you've gotten started with making some changes and making your updates, you can see that you can leverage AI to to write analysis and make recommendations. So let's go with this Analyze Data option in this AI drawer on the right hand side here. That pulls together some really nice short term analysis. So let's go ahead and ask it to also view some long term trends. Awesome. So it also gave us a really nice accompanying chart just to give us some visuals of what what trends it's describing, but let's go ahead and just ask it to paste in those short term trends so we have something nice and clean for our report. And there we have it. That looks great. So I'll shut this AI drawer here and we can go ahead and hit save. So as your end users make their updates, they can also hover over this period, period. Tag on each of these fields and pull up the View History panel on the right hand side. From here you can see a timeline of all the times that you've updated this measure or the element that you're completing and make sure that you're reporting out with consistency and continuity. We also have a discussions panel here where you can communicate with your colleagues and begin discussing some of the strategy challenges before the meeting even starts. And finally, the manager of the workflow can see who's making their updates in real time and be able to nudge folks forward as needed.

Wow. So you can make all of your updates in one place. And what I like about next is the side drawer is very consistent for all of your actions like instructions, AI mentions and history. This makes clearpoint Next easier to learn and to use. Hey angel, one quick thing. How do you put data in to update the charts?

The same way that you used to do it in Classic. So if you're updating data manually, you can just scroll down to your data table and go ahead and input any data in here and then just go ahead and click save. So calculations will happen and charts will update automatically. And if we add a lot of new data, you may want to rerun the AI analysis as well.

It's great to see how clean and easy the reporting process can be. Just want to remind everyone that the data entry process doesn't have to be manual. We have a data loader. Let's see if I can share my screen a little bit just to the next slide. So we have a data loader that connects to databases with a SQL query and can import Excel and CSV files on a schedule or automatically. This makes getting all of your data into clearpoint quickly and easily.

Yep, the data loader is good, but we still have many clients that either collect their information manually or put it all into a spreadsheet for some data manipulation before loading it into clearpoint. So in clearpoint Next, we made it even easier. Let me steal that screen share back. Awesome. So now we're taking a look at all the initiatives that we have inside of the scorecard and you can check out these two new Buttons that we have at the very top of the table for download, view and upload edits. And just like it sounds like, you'll be able to import and export any information that you have about any element in clearpoint. So you can take your projects, pull in start dates percent complete and any other information with just a quick upload. So let's run through what that looks like. So we'll open up that Excel spreadsheet that's been downloaded. Let's zoom in a bit. But this will be the exact same table that we were just viewing inside of the application, with the exact same columns and elements all listed. So from here, let's just make some simple changes to our start and end dates and upload them back into clearpoint. These last three initiatives here all have not been started yet. So let's go ahead and grab that start date, we'll paste that over, make sure that they all kick off on November 1st, and then let's just go ahead and set that end date to all match with December 1st as well. And I'll hit save here.

I'm not able to see the spreadsheet. Oops, you're only sharing one window.

Thanks for the heads up. So let me share this. There we go. So that's what that spreadsheet looks like that we pulled from the application. And all I did here was grab one of these values and update these final three cells to both have a start date of November 1st and an end date of December 1st. So again, we'll just hit save here and make sure to upload this back into clearpoint. So I'll go ahead and make sure to switch that over to the clearpoint screen again. Perfect. And now we can go ahead and jump in with this upload edits piece here. Awesome. So now you can see that for those final three elements, we have that November 1st start date and December 1st start end date, so we can review all of our changes and hit save before pushing to upload all of our edits in.

That is so cool. I bet it makes setting up an account very easy.

Yes, we've taken the time down from hours to minutes.

The magic here is that you can choose your level of automation, whether your team updates manually or you're fully automated. Clearpoint adapts, and when updates come in, they're instantly visible across your dashboards. Angel, before we move forward, can you export again and just show us what that spreadsheet looks like?

For sure. So I'll go ahead and click this Download view button and super quickly it pulls that file through and switch over to that spreadsheet that we have. So it looks something like this. It'll contain all the same columns that you have on screen whenever you hit that download button and will include all the same elements as well.

Yeah. So this is particularly cool because back on the other screen we can change the columns and you can add as many columns as you want with all of your information in it, and then you can export.

Yep. So just to point out some of those areas that Ted was mentioning, we have that columns dropdown. Super easy to change exactly what columns you're showing in your table, click to include with that checkbox and click to remove. And then once you export, you'll see the exact same table.

Awesome. Any other questions about the import, export or any of our data import features? I know in the chat some of you are having trouble, trouble seeing the video, so we're trying to slow down a little bit, but hopefully, hopefully it keeps up. So, so this example, so there's a question in about, you know, why is this example any easier than manually importing data? And, and in my mind, one of the things that makes it easier, angel, if you want to switch over to just while you're on this page, the series data view in a measure. So if we went over to our measures, we could choose all of our reporting periods, export all of our data down, and then make changes and re import it. So, so, and you can do that across a variety of elements. So for organizations that are not able to pull data automatically because they do some level of manipulation of the data manually, this is a way that you can update it that way and all the elements can be updated that way. So appreciate all the questions. Let me see, there are a few more. Can we import from any other data capture platform as long as it has an API? Angel, I'll let you answer that one.

Yep. For this import export feature, you will need to make sure that you're staying within the formatting of the template provided when you download the table out. So if you do have some data captured that you want to input into your spreadsheet and upload that back in, that'll absolutely work. But. But beyond that, we do have some additional custom API integrations that we can absolutely make happen with our clearpoint API as well.

Awesome. And then we got another question. We have a lot of questions. I should have had you use the questionnaire, but I like everyone being able to see the questions as well. Says if you add a new column to the spreadsheet, will that get Added or created upon re upload. The way it works is you would add the column in clearpoint. It can be completely blank and then you export it and then you could add all of the information you want and load it that way. That way clearpoint knows where the columns should be mapped. Because there's so many different types of custom fields in clearpoint, some with HTML and some with dates and some with currency. This way clearpoint is going to know how to map up to it very nicely. So it's a great way just to import or export. And then, John, you did not miss anything. You can import data just directly on a detail page in a data table. You absolutely can do that. This is just another opportunity to import and sometimes you can import extra information this way a little bit faster, especially if you have bulk information. So that's really nice. Okay, so great discussion about getting your data in. Now let's talk about structuring information in clearpoint, because once you've got your data, the next challenge is making sense of it. So we've added some additional AI features in clearpoint next to make it easy to manage. I know angel was able to show you how you can use AI to support doing analysis, making recommendations, but let's get back to our data update story.

Let's talk about charting. One of the first things we've done in clearpoint is to allow for full branding across the account. So I'm going to jump over to that area now. The primary and secondary account colors will be used for general design throughout Clearpoint. And then we also have five accent colors that will be applied to your default charts automatically.

So this is really cool because it allows you to make great professional reports without having to individually tweak each chart. The colors from your own brand guide will make your briefing books consistent, which will allow your leadership team to focus on making decisions, not figuring out your charts correct.

Then, within each chart we have some new AI charting features, one of my favorites. Let's jump over to an example so you can tell clearpoint what you want to visualize and it'll build the chart for you, whether that's gauges, lines or bars. And they'll all be styled consistently with those account colors that were set up. So I'll double click to edit this chart here for revenue and I'm going to use that AI assistant. And we'll just ask make this an area chart. And that looks great. So we can go ahead and just hit save here so that chart looks awesome and AI calculations take it even further. So you can also build formulas across scorecards and KPIs with natural language. No coding required. So let's head over to that data table. I'm going to double click into YTD Actual and set up a calculation with AI here. So we'll turn that into a calculated series and then we can rely on our AI assistant over here as well. Great. So it gives us a quick overview, but since we have this YTD Actual already set up, it just doesn't have a calculation. I'm going to ask it to make this a YTD sum of actual. And just like that, it pulls together the calculation formula. So I'm going to say this looks good to me and once again we can go ahead and hit save.

Okay, so this is pretty amazing because, you know, many of you have struggled with making great calculations. I'm one of the ones that really struggles with it as well because we have the ability to do case, when and if, then statements. And now with AI, it will just make all the calculations the direct way that you want them to. So the result is of course, beautifully branded charts that can easily pull your data without you having to learn charting or learn calculations. So the AI within clearpoint can do all the writing that you want, like analysis and recommendations, but. But now it can do tasks within clearpoint like making charts, improving calculations, and even making project plans. We showed that in our webinar last month. So we did get a question. Angel says in the past, when using the AI, if your data was exposed to a third party outside of clearpoint, we had to agree to use the AI in our government. Turn the AI off. So is the AI open to a third party outside the organization? So we might not be able to take advantage of the AI for the same reason. So good question. So in what we're doing right now, we are using like as of today, let's say the 16th of October, we're using OpenAI as our language model. That will be really helpful with us. But we're also very soon, hopefully by the end of this year, 2025, we'll be able to allow you to choose your LLM so that if your organization only allows you to use claude, you'll be able to switch to CLAUDE and then be able to use it. But for those organizations that are not allowed by their company or by their government not to use AI, we could still turn it off on the back end. You just wouldn't see the AR overall. Yeah. So we will have a lot of options. I think Copilot would also be an option as well. So I'm getting a lot of questions, which I think is great because we do have time for questions and that's what we wanted to allow for. So can we ask the AI to compare multiple reports across scorecards and pull together a summary of the common themes and patterns? Hold your horses on that. I'm going to show you a preview at the end of the webinar about how we can do that. Right. And then any additional functionality and calculations in clearpoint next. Like more functions or programming logic, we do have all of the SQL capabilities for combining and managing calculations in clearpoint and we have trained the AI on everything that's capable there. If you're looking for other things, just, just let us know and we will. We'll see what we can do for additional calculations. So. And I see there are a couple of comments about Copilot Copilot 365. We will, you know when, when we follow up from this, we'll tell you where we are with that or ask your customer success manager about how we're doing there and we'll be able to give you a direct update on it. So now we've got great data and charts and branding, but the real test is how well you communicate it with clearpoint.

Next, we've upgraded the way that you can manage information on a page so consistency is built in. You can drag and drop layouts on any detail page to match your organization's brand. So whether it's goals, KPIs or projects, they all follow the same modern format. Let's make some changes to this element detail page using that drag and drop. So it's as easy as grabbing the corner of a pod. And let's go ahead and pull out this key revenue chart so that it is loud and proud at the top of the page and hit save. And as easy as that, that's adjusted my layout so you can also manage summary reports and scorecard landing pages with ease. So let's go ahead and jump over to a scorecard landing page like our executive dashboard here. And we can also adjust pods, the same exact process. So I'll pull out this key analysis chart or POD here, make it a bit larger. Great. And finally you can also adjust your grid style layouts really easily in clearpoint Next. So we'll go over to our strategic plan and from here all you need to do is use this kebab icon, edit your layout. And inside of this drawer that opens up on the right hand side, just like our many other Drawers that we've been running through. You can now configure your report, configure your columns, set up different custom colors, and so on and so forth from one place.

Job is to make your job easier. And we've been ready to see Drive while I features on the object we what we you can drag.

Looks like we may be having a couple of connectivity issues. So I can pick up from that Measure Dashboard view that was next up. Let's go ahead and switch over here. But from your Measure Dashboard view, you can see all of your charts in one place and now you can filter on these views to just see what's important to you. We could do a whole webinar on filtering and I showed a bit already with the series detail view. But this is a really great way to import and export data inside of clearpoint as well. So those are some great measure views.

Yes, I'm back. Sorry. Yeah, there are other cool. We showed some of the other cool views in Measures earlier just in this discussion. But we also have on the initiative side, we have these Kanban boards and this is what angel is showing now. It's so important to be able to prioritize and track your initiatives. Kanban boards give you the flexibility, give you just that flexibility. So you can drag initiatives from one column to the next. And you can even have multiple boards with different ways of viewing your information. These same types of Kanban boards work outside of Initiatives, but Initiatives is a great place to visualize something like a stage gate process. So it's really nice. And then we also have one more initiative view that I'd like to show we showed last month in our webinar. It's the Gantt Chart view. And the Gantt Chart view can also show a burndown chart of all of your projects here. So the blue line is if all of your projects get completed within the time frame that you laid out, and the red line is looking at the percent complete of those initiatives. So here we are, you know, with that vertical line and thinking, should we really be launching these three new initiatives if we're so far behind with our five other initiatives? It's just a great visual to have that strategic discussion. Okay, sorry. I got so excited about all these new features, I just had to show them off. Where were we communicating and reporting? But before we go there, before we go back there, I did see a few other questions in the chat. One is, is this mobile friendly? And the answer is yes. So we've designed clearpoint not with a mobile app, but so that you could log in on any device, whether it's your phone or a tablet, or tablet in landscape mode or your big screen computer, you can do it all in clearpoint and it's going to adjust. Of course, if you have a big Gantt chart like this on your phone, be prepared to do a lot of scrolling or have it zoom out appropriately. And then the next question might have been more context of when it happened. So it was for management to view measures or designing it. Yes, so. So you're correct. I think this is related to the mobile. Friendly is where you know you're right. The mobile is going to be much easier just for scrolling and navigating. Whereas if you're going to be opening that drawer on the right hand side for all of your editing, you're going to be way better off with either a tablet or a, or a computer. So, okay, let's get back to communicating and reporting.

Awesome. One of the challenges that we hear from people is that they get so many great details in clearpoint they don't know how to summarize their work. So let's let AI help again with AI summaries that automatically write your executive summary or exception report. So it'll highlight what's off track and why and give leaders the insight that they need. So let's jump over to a report. We'll go back to that executive dashboard. We'll actually focus on that analysis pod that we just adjusted. So I'll double click right into here, just like we did when making our updates. Grab that AI assistant again. And this time we're going to select Scorecard Report and we'll give this a moment as it will be giving us a full summary of our entire scorecard's performance.

This is cool, but do you think we could summarize it into maybe just a few paragraphs rather than reading each of the objectives?

Yes, let's do that.

You know, executive teams don't like to read very much, so this is perfect. This feature that we're showing here is one of the features we actually use pretty regularly at clearpoint. So in our quarterly reporting we do an AI summary of, of all of the work that we do. So we do the workflow like we showed earlier in this everyone makes their updates and then we do the the AI summary of it and send it out as a pre read and it works really great. Okay, let's move to the home stretch. Reporting is one thing, but engaging your team in the results is where the real impact happens.

Clearpoint makes that easy. You can have discussions directly in the platform mentioned Teammates ask for updates or flag issues for follow up and receive your notifications over email or directly in Microsoft Teams.

Let me share the Teams work because teams is totally awesome and combining this with workflow makes it really easy for your organization to lean in and fully engage with the strategy. It's hard to execute strategy without engagement from across the organization. So we're listening to our clients, we're making lots of improvements as you can see from this webinar. You know, in the teams you get, you can search for any of your elements, you can actually do updates, you can receive alerts, you can actually receive documents. So if you print a briefing book, it can come to you in teams. Even if you have your briefing books being sent out to many people in your organization like your leadership team, if they're all engaged in teams, it will show up that way and then you receive those mentions and you can reply as well. So I'm going to try to show something new that we're doing over here. Angel's been showing you everything that is fully released, but I want to show you something that is not there yet. So I'm going to try to share my screen. This wouldn't be a good angel and Ted webinar if I didn't go off script a little bit. This one. Hopefully you can see it here. Similar account that angel was showing for most of this demo. But I wanted to show you kind of this top level AI assistant that we're working on and this is the strategy assistant that we're rolling out later this year. So yes, in two and a half months. And we've designed it to look like an easy to use AI. So something you might be that, that, that might look familiar to you. And it's we're still in development mode so it might not work perfectly. But if we wanted to do a SWOT analysis on my account or on one of my departments like Domino's, I could say yeah, why don't you read all of my information and do a swat, Right. So tell me what my strengths are. My weaknesses are my opportunities and my threats as well. Right. And so this is why we haven't released it yet because sometimes it does a quick hiccup. So let's say slot again, I'll give it one other chance. But this is where so some of the questions earlier, Bethany, I think you asked, one of them was like could we look across the organization? And so with this AI strategy assistant, it can look across your entire account and be able to compare departments or find high performers or low performers, or look at all of your projects and say which projects are, are conflicting with other projects, things like that. And so in this case, if we see on the bottom here says, would you like me to suggest strategic initiatives based on the SWOT findings? Yes. Like that would be really cool. Right. And so this is the next piece where it says, yes, I can do a SWOT analysis and then I can make recommendations for you. Right. So reviewing those proposed initiatives, like should we expand our digital ordering capabilities or launch an enhanced employee training program? Let's say no, we don't want to expand our digital ordering. We already got a team doing that launching enhanced training program. Yep, that looks good. But call it enhanced employee training program for field employees. And we can select the dates of when it would start, etc. Let's start it on November 3rd and we could even end it by the end of the year. So the idea with clearpoint and some of our AI features are that we can not only do writing for you, like the analysis and recommendations, but also do tasks for you, like angel showed, and then be able to do the strategic information to be able to add directly to here. Right. So this is just beginning to scratch the surface. And if I go back to that assistant kind of starting page, imagine being able to ask it any question that you want and it would be in there. So the great thing is this assistant is going to know everything about your strategy. So if you've been using clearpoint for one year, it has one year of data. If you're one of our long term clients, you've been using Clearpoint for 10 or more years, it's going to have 10 years of data. So it would be really, really cool.

Yep. It's like having a strategy consultant built into your system that can help guide your next move.

Yep. So strategy execution has always felt like, you know, you're herding cats, you know, with those updates you're collecting, you know, cleaning your data, pushing reports up here uphill, you know, clearpoint next should help change that.

With automation, AI and better collaboration, you can finally spend less time building reports and more time driving results. Yes.

So I see one more question before we wrap up. And you know, will, will the, the assistant, you know, assume that you're using the risk element in clearpoint? Not necessarily. It should know if you have that element hidden. And so if you asked about it, it wouldn't see any data there at all because as you know, many of you might not be using action items or risk or might have relabeled something, the AI should be able to read all of your labels. So if you're calling strategies, sorry, if you're calling goals, objectives or you're calling initiatives, projects or measures, KPIs, it should be there. So don't worry. One last question. Are there any resources about this, like a generic video on how to use AI or clearpoint Next that you can share with your organization? Absolutely. We've created a nice three minute video on our website that walks you through clearpoint in the big picture. And then we also have a tour of our AI features as well that you can see and click like Next Next and shows you different screens and walks you through everything. So. Okay, so thank you all for joining us today. Last question, when does this launch? So everything that angel showed you is launched and live and there today. Right. And so if you're a client and you want to get access to it, please reach out to your customer success manager to schedule time to migrate over. And if you're not a client and you're considering clearpoint, you're going to start in this version. The reason why you would migrate over if you are a current client is you might have written some customizations into your charts. We want to work with you to make sure that that branding works carefully and appropriately with you along the way. So for that, thanks. And my stuff, the AI Strategy Assistant will be launched by the end of the year. So thank you all for joining us today and hopefully you learned a lot.

Thanks everyone. Happy reporting.