Strategic Analysis

One of the most frequent reasons for ineffective strategic planning is failure to think strategically. In these cases, planners mistake organizational efficiency to be organizational effectiveness.

One of the key indicators of this problem is planners' reluctance to conduct a solid strategic analysis that includes assessment of the external environment of the organization and feedback from stakeholders. As a result, planners end up looking only at what the organization is internally doing now and how they might do it a little bit better. In their planning they end up fine tuning what the organization is already doing, rather than shoring up weaknesses to avoid oncoming threats and using strengths to take advantage of new opportunities.

NSA will help you develop suggestions to ensure genuine strategic thinking by helping your business:

• Recognize strategies to be associated with, e.g., resolving major issues, developing new systems  or IT programs, servicing additional or smaller IT mandates, or systems evaluations for survival or efficiency.
• Develop strategies that focus on structural changes as much as possible. These changes are more likely to direct and sustain changes in the organization.
• Ask the question, "How do we position ourselves if the future changes, and what if it is not what we expected?"
• Utilizing a brainstorming technique to collect all ideas from planning members.
• Ask, "Is this really a strategic activity? Will it leverage change in your organization?"
• Reconsider strategies that have worked or haven't in the past.
• Ensure strategies don't conflict with each other, i.e., that implementing one strategy will directly impair implementation of another.

Simply put, strategic Analysis determines where an organization is going over the next year or more, how it's going to get there and how it'll know if it got there or not. The focus of a strategic plan is usually on the entire organization, while the focus of a business plan is usually on a particular product, service or program. There are a variety of perspectives, models and approaches used in strategic analysis. The way that a IT strategic plan is developed depends on the nature of the organization's leadership, culture of the organization, complexity of the organization's environment, size of the organization and expertise of planners.

Many planners prefer to start strategic planning by clarifying the mission, vision and/or values of the organization. Other planners prefer to start by taking a wide look around the external environment of the organization and also the inside of the organization, and then clarifying/strategizing what the organization should do as a result of what the planners find.

A frequent complaint about IT strategic plans is that they are merely "to-do" lists of what to accomplish over the next few years. Or, others complain that strategic planning never seems to come in handy when the organization is faced with having to make a difficult, major decision. or, or others complain that strategic planning really doesn't help the organization face the future. These complaints arise because organizations fail to conduct a thorough strategic analysis as part of their strategic planning process. Instead, planners decide to plan only from what they know now. This makes the planning process much less strategic and a lot more guesswork. IT Strategic analysis is the heart of the strategic planning process and should not be ignored.

NSA can help you work through the questions and answers develop a comprehensive informational technology strategic analysis that will help you make the decisions to achieve your business goals.