Why Fly? (Why Develop Strategies?)

Geese migrate for several reasons (Why Files, 1996), changing climatic conditions, seasonally fluctuating food resources and to create more geese. The geese that prepare for migration, and then move in the right direction at the right time, survive.

Similarly, organizations need to recognize changing business climates, fluctuating resources, and the need to expand or grow (Heske, 2001). Organizations have to plan where they want to take the business and to prepare accordingly. All factors including IT have to be considered and taken into account holistically.

There is no balance in nature; there is perpetual disruption, as organisms and environments transform each other. Organizations, structures, careers, products, markets, and suppliers are all subject to continual change (Kelly, 1998). Change is a natural and creative force that both destroys and creates. Organizations need to develop strategies to cope with and survive change.

Key tasks of managers within an organization are to acquire, develop and allocate organizations resources, and to develop and exploit the organizations capacity for innovation (Burgleman et al., 2001). The acquisition, development, allocation and exploitation of IT should be part of any business strategy. Many new products and services such as on-line banking, airline reservation systems, and voice mail have been based on IT (Laudon & Laudon, 2002). IT can contribute to the overall performance of the organization by synergistically tying operations of various business units together so the organization can act as whole (Laudon & Laudon, 2002). This could lower costs, increase customer access; speed up the marketing process of new products and services. IT can assist an organization develop a central core of competencies by allowing knowledge to be shared across the organization (Laudon & Laudon, 2002). It is unlikely that these contributions and possible innovations will occur by chance; they need to be planned.

Hammer and Champy (2001) presented a way of improving organizational, team, and individual performance by first getting a birds-eye view of how work gets done. They advocated rethinking and redesigning business processes to improve an organizations performance.

Tallon and Kraemer (2000) found that organizations with focused IT goals achieved higher payoffs from IT. Their results indicate that unfocused organizations achieve consistently lower payoffs at each point along the value chain than focused organizations. Organizations must formulate and implement an Internet Strategy (Afuah & Tucci, 2001) as part of their overall strategies.

Linear planning is useless; organizations must plan holistically (Hartman et al., 2000) or harmoniously in order to survive.