The Daily App: C-SWOT for iPhone

The basic SWOT Analysis – which examines strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, hence, “SWOT” – has become a staple of many enterprises in managing day-to-day, short-term and long-term planning and decision making.

The “balanced scorecard” is another approach to evaluation: considering the actions impact learning, customer, company and financial perspectives – and using comparative question-asking, it will assign points to each potential option you could choose in making a decision.

And now these two methodologies have been combined and bottled up into the form of an app now available for 99 cents from the Apple iTunes App Store. (It was only a matter of time).

C-SWOT, by developer P. F. Abifarin, is an app that lets you essentially mashup all of the critical SWOTs of a decision, assign a number from zero to five for how important each criteria are, how critical the potential outcomes are in each aspect of an organization, and press a button for an instant analysis.

That analysis is delivered in a colorful bar-chart format, along with a text-based analysis, that you can export as a PDF for sharing or presenting.

Technically, this app is snappy, it’s quick and it provides for blazingly fast analysis of business or social decisions that you may be confronting. It’s colorful and it’s inexpensive. It does provide a nifty chart for whatever your decision may be.

Of course, you may not subscribe to the theories of either SWOT analysis or the balanced scorecard (this a review of the app, not of either methodology), in which case the app probably won’t provide you with much value. But if you use these methodologies or are just interested in seeing this analysis at work, for less than a buck you can give C-SWOT a try.