Internet of Things and Data Analytics Handbook

20STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT AND BIG DATA ANALYTICS

NEIL FRASER

Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

20.1 INTRODUCTION

One of the many challenges in strategic planning is engaging people on purpose, vision, and values of an organization. These can be articulated as three simple questions:

• Why we exist?
• What we aim to be?
• How we act?

The interesting thing about asking simple questions is that they can be quite difficult to answer and also often lead to the most compelling and unusual answers.

The simple questions are also asked at specific times to help inform future direction in any organization. These moments of agency often come at a point of leadership change when strategy, and its development, is reviewed, renewed, or completely rewritten. The strategist’s role in this process is to ensure that complexity is reduced where possible [1] and that the executives are asking the right questions and to make sure the vision and purpose are aligned with the promises made to customers. It is also a time to horizon scan for future events that might impact current or future strategy. All of these activities bring together a strategic understanding of a current situation at the moment of agency [2].

To actually build momentum around a single vision is no easy task in any organization. In Henry Mintzberg’s famous five types of organizational structure, it is clear that to set and build unity around a single vision and purpose [3] has a different level of complexity depending ...