Fusing Intelligence and Strategy Capabilities: The MIQ Experience

Abstract

New Zealand’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine (‘MIQ’) was a rapidly established, distributed isolation and quarantine capability, designed to maintain the restricted international movement of people into New Zealand between April 2020 and August 2022 and to provide some of these services to those in our communities. The rapid establishment of this complex function (in addition to the fast-changing COVID-19 landscape) led to the requirement for quick operational decisions, with strategic impacts, often being made with limited information. The MIQ Future Strategy Team (FST) was established in August 2021 to enhance MIQ leadership’s ability to make robust future-focused strategic decisions. It successfully achieved this by (uniquely) establishing an intelligence and strategy ‘fused’ capability, delivering integrated planning and predictive analysis in a manner not achievable via a single discipline. Its success demonstrated the compound value of fusing complementary business functions and adopting intelligence functionality within business environments unfamiliar with these concepts. This article explores how this was achieved, conveys lessons identified through this journey and describes three case studies which highlight FST outputs.