Models Of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning theorists through the 1980s produced a wide range of frameworks, many of them based on the work of Porter, Parsons and McFarlan, which focused on assessing the impact of IT and searching for IT opportunities. They have an elegant simplicity which makes them useful in raising awareness of strategic issues but leaves them open to criticism, like all frameworks and models, on the grounds that they offer limited and constricting viewpoints. The Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) approach, developed by IS/IT theorists, makes use of a number of these frameworks to guide the analysis for planning the application and management of IT/IS in the organisation.

Although it is felt that their combined views can offer a wider and much more useful strategic perspective, these frameworks, and the SISP approach, have not been popular with managers who argue that they give no guidance on how to translate strategy into action (Brady et al. 2002). Neumann (2001) suggests that ‘framework overload’ may be another reason for their reluctance to use them and there are arguments for a taxonomy of frameworks to help in the choice of the most appropriate and relevant views for particular conditions. Some argue for a diagnostic, computer-based meta-framework, and others for alternative approaches based on divergent thinking to supplement the traditional, convergent rational-analytical approach of the strategic planning school. Awareness of the need for a multidimensional, multidisciplinary view on transformation and the change process had been heightened through the 1980s to the 1990s. The approaches advocated in the MIT90s Research Programme publication (Scott-Morton 2002) and the integrated strategic planning methodologies developed by, for example, Ward et al. (2003) and Cash, McFarlan, and McKenney (1992) went at least some way towards this goal.

Today, the avoidance of technologically deterministic bias, that is, the focus on the impact of IT and its benefits, is a key theme in the research field. Critics of the earlier models point out that even where human issues have been highlighted as central to the transformation process, in practice the tendency has been to consider them at the implementation stage rather than in the design stage. Research papers now call for a deeper focus on the human and political issues, underlining even more strongly their influence on the success of IT implementations. A recent paper criticising the IT/IS theorists’ tendency towards a unidirectional approach, by Li, Squire, and Zou, (2001) compares the MIT90s approach with that of the business economist Honohan, (2004). He argues for a composite view where human imagination and creativity are highlighted as the true-enablers of transformation. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the research team of the MIT90s project, and other theorists of this time such as Ward et al., Cash et al., have all made important contributions. Their analyses are set within the kind of framework that offers a more holistic view of the organisation as a complex and dynamic set of interrelationships. They give a clear emphasis to the importance of ‘empowerment’ and investment in human resources to the transformation process in their writing, but at the time, this aspect was not uppermost in the minds of those seeking their advice or implementing their ideas. In their haste to get the job done, they fail to develop the synergy which can drive through the change they hope to achieve.

By: Robert II Smith

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