MIS 3301

Managing IT in an Organization

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 strategic thinking
• Strategic thinking is simply an intentional and
rational thought process that focuses on the
analysis of critical factors and variables that
will influence the long-term success of a
business, a team, or an individual.
• Strategic thinking includes careful and
deliberate anticipation of threats and
vulnerabilities to guard against and
opportunities to pursue.

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• Ultimately strategic thinking and analysis lead
to a clear set of goals, plans, and new ideas
required to survive and thrive in a
competitive, changing environment.
• This sort of thinking must account for
economic realities, market forces, and
available resources.
• Strategic thinking requires research, analytical
thinking, innovation, problem-solving skills,
communication and leadership skills, and
decisiveness.
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Why is Strategic Thinking Important?
• The competitive landscape can change quickly
for any organization.
• New trends may emerge quickly and require
you to take advantage of them or fall behind.
• By incorporating everyday strategic thinking
into your work and life routines, you will
become more skilled at anticipating,
forecasting, and capitalizing on opportunities.

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 What is Strategic Thinking in Business?
• During an organization’s annual strategic planning process,
leaders often compile, analyze, and synthesize external and
internal data and ideas to develop its strategic intent and
build a strategic narrative.
• This document will guide the company into the future for a
defined period of time. Leaders then choose and plan
specific actions that will accomplish these strategic
initiatives.
• Businesses also need to schedule a time for strategic
thinking and reviews throughout the year. Leadership
teams should periodically examine their strategic initiatives
to ensure execution is taking place, review, and sustain the
effort across the organization.
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What is Strategic Thinking in Leadership?
• Business leaders and stakeholders use
strategic thinking and analysis to decide what
product mix they’ll offer, what competitive
landscape to compete in (or not compete in),
and how limited resources will be allocated
such as time, employees, and capital.
• They must decide how to best structure enroll
others to achieve important objectives and to
avoid putting resources at unnecessary risk of
loss.
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 Components of Strategic Thinking
• In simple terms, strategic thinking and/or
planning consists of three phases that identify
and clarify:
• 1) where we are now;
• 2) where we want to be; and
• 3) how we will get there.
• Six common components include: 1) tools for
analysis; 2) strategic purpose; 3) values; 4)
vision; 5) key goals; and 6) action planning.

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 How to Improve Strategic Thinking Skills
• There are five steps to improving your strategic thinking skills:
• 1) Set aside time to reflect and plan for the future, identify
trends, prioritize tasks, and determine where to allocate
resources
• 2) Uncover your own biases so you can think more clearly about
strategy
• 3) Listen to subject matter experts and opinion leaders in your
organization to obtain higher quality information you can use in
your strategic thinking
• 4) Learn to ask good questions to uncover better options and
plans—questions such as “Is this idea from a credible source?”
and “Is this idea logical?”
• 5) Explore all the consequences of different strategies and
directions
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 Strategic Planning
• Strategic planning is “an organized process
through which the organization’s leaders may
take decision regarding the institution’s future
and development, in addition to following up
on the required procedure and measures
towards achieving the desired future, and
finding methods to measure the success of
these operations’ execution” (Al-Zboon and
Hasan 2011).

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• It is a leadership tool that helps an organization
make intentional decisions regarding what the
organization does now and how it will do what it
does in the future, why the organization engages in
particular activities, and how the organization will
meet its goals.
• Mission, vision, organizational values, and
organizational goals are important foundations in
the strategic planning process.
• Strategic planning is a tool for organizing the
present on the basis of the projections of the
desired future.
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 Why Strategic Planning?
• Besides the personal satisfaction of taking charge of the organizations
future, strategic planning offers at least five compelling reasons for its
use:
• - Forces a look into the future and therefore provides an opportunity to
influence the future, or assume a proactive posture. Company must
begin to anticipate future change rather than merely react to change.
• - Provides better awareness of needs and of the facilities related issues
and environment.
• - Helps define the overall mission of the organization and focuses on
the objectives.
• - Provides a sense of direction, continuity, and effective staffing and
leadership.
• - Plugs everyone into the system and provides standards of
accountability for people, programs, and allocated resources (Ahoy,
1998).

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 Strategic Planning Model
• In order to develop and implement a strategic plan, an
organization must have a sense of its purpose and its
guiding principles.
• The important concepts that build the base of a strategic
plan are:
• Organizational Mission
• Vision
• Goals – are the end results toward which institutional
resources and activities are directed.
• Values - are the principles, standards, beliefs, and actions
that members of an organization consider important and
feel represent their activities.
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 Strategic alignments
• Organizations are becoming increasingly aware of
the importance of aligning information systems with
organizational processes, goals and strategies.
• In order for senior management to pro-actively
involve IS in the business, it must be knowledgeable
and comfortable with IT (Snr mgt’s knowledge of IT).
• The social dimension of strategic alignment has
been defined as “the state in which business and IT
executives within an organizational unit understand
and are committed to the business and IT mission,
objectives, and plans”
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 Business process reengineering
• BPR is known by many names, such as ‘core
process redesign’, ‘new industrial engineering’
or ‘working smarter’.
• All of them imply the same concept which
focuses on integrating both business process
redesign and deploying IT to support the
reengineering work.

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 What is BPR?
• Generally the topic of BPR involves discovering
how business processes currently operate, how to
redesign these processes to eliminate the wasted
or redundant effort and improve efficiency, and
how to implement the process changes in order to
gain competitiveness.
• The aim of BPR, according to Sherwood-Smith
(1994), is “seeking to devise new ways of
organising tasks, organising people and redesigning
IT systems so that the processes support the
organisation to realise its goals”.
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• Another BPR father, Davenport (1993),
describes ‘business process redesign’ as:
• ... the analysis and design of workflows and
processes within and between organisations.
• Business activities should be viewed as more
than a collection of individual or even
functional tasks; they should be broken down
into processes that can be designed for
maximum effectiveness, in both
manufacturing and service environment.

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 The Key Concepts
• BPR seeks to break from current processes and to devise new
ways of organising tasks, organising people and making use of
IT systems so that the resulting processes will better support
the goals of the organisation.
• This activity is done by identifying the critical business
processes, analysing these processes and redesigning them for
efficient improvement and benefit.
• Vidgen et al. (1994) define the central tenets of BPR as:
• • radical change and assumption challenge;
• • process and goal orientation;
• • organisational re-structuring;
• • the exploitation of enabling technologies, particularly
information technology.
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 BPR as Radical Change
• BPR is a radical change, rather than incremental
change. Hammer and Champy (1993) highlight this
tenet as:
• Re-engineering is ... about rejecting the
conventional wisdom and received assumptions of
the past. ... Reengineering is the search for new
models of organising work.
• Tradition counts for nothing.
• Re-engineering is a new beginning. ... To succeed
at reengineering, you have to be a visionary, a
motivator, and a leg breaker.
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 Challenges
• Sabotage
• Resistant to change
• Legacy systems
• Misunderstandings
• Misconception
• Lack of commitment from the top
management

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 Reading Assignment
• Total Quality Management (TQM)
• Electronic Government
• E-Service implementation

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THANK YOU

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