CHAPTER TWELVE
Strategic Planning
THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (IT) strategic planning and looks at competitive strategies and business intelligence and their link to corporate strategy. These, in turn, influence the development of strategic IT frameworks and applications. Strategic planning also includes the management of IT human resources, employee policies, agreements, contracts, segregation of duties within IT, and the implementation of effective IT training and education.
STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT PROCESS
The strategic management process uses qualitative and quantitative information under conditions of uncertainty in order to integrate both intuition and analysis. Management intuition is based on judgment, past experiences, and feelings and is used in conditions of great uncertainty or conditions where there is no precedent to assist management in making decisions. At all levels within the organization, management must make decisions under conditions of uncertainty on a daily basis and it is their intuition which influences that interpretation of analyses that affects the strategic decisions taken. A key attribute of the strategic management process is adaptability to change, and organizations must monitor internal and external events as an iterative process in order to ensure timely adaptation is affected.
Over the past 20 years, the magnitude of the rate of change in information technology as well as its acceleration, combined with increased access to global ...
