Business Strategy in Organisations

The tendency for complex ideas to be distorted through interpretation or simplification for practical use or used to achieve goals which differ from those assumed in the original message, as explained in more detail later, has to be considered in any criticism of the work in this field. Similar difficulties are also evident in the academic field, where authors’ interpretations of each others’ ideas can vary so much. Research efforts continue to try to broaden our perspectives and to deepen our understanding of the relationship between information technology, information systems, information management, and organisational management. Use is being made of theories from both the economic and social/ behavioural sciences. Their different perspectives are helping to develop more integrated and multidimensional views of IT in the organisation. Economic theories provide a focus on the cost saving/profit maximising effects of IT; social/behavioural theories; decision and control theory, sociological, post-industrial, cultural and political theories; seek to explain the effects as they are influenced by the various behaviours of the people who make up the organisation and the cultural and political environments in which they live and work. Some theorists from the critical social sciences school, for example, Barrell, Dury and Hurst argue that management’s difficulties with the current IT-strategy discourse and SISP relate to: excessive rationalism, a linear and hierarchical approach, the separation of planning from doing, of strategy from tactics. It has been assumed that IT can be related to strategy by analytical means alone. If organisations do not have an explicit strategy, one can be created for the purpose. IT/IS is assumed to be highly malleable, subject to managerial control and direction. Strategic applications are believed to be discovered by means of a planning mechanism. This approach ignores the large body of criticism and evidence against the rational perspective which had developed both in the field of business strategy and that of IS development and implementation.

Much of their research, based on detailed case studies, supports the processual view of strategy as emergent and contingent rather than rationally planned; and confirms their views on the centrality of organisational politics in the alignment of IT and corporate strategy. They stress that, in order to understand how and why this is so, any analysis of the strategy process in the organisation should incorporate a conception of power and identity. It should consider both the internal and external political contexts.

Research interest in explaining the gap between the actual results and the rational intentions of strategic decision making and the notions that the conflicting political and social agendas of different groups can delay, divert or subvert intentions to produce unexpected outcomes, is not new. Lindblom (1959) was one of the first to criticise the rational model of strategy formation. In a paper entitled ‘The science of muddling through’, he described strategy formation as an incremental process set within a social and political context. He argued that a limited number of strategy alternatives (not all, as in the idealised but unattainable rational model) were compared and choices made according to the likely success of the outcome and the ease with which strategy could be put into action. He called this strategy building through successive limited comparisons. The options most usually chosen are those that build on the current experience of the organisation and its managers and decisions are tested in action before being developed further.