IT Strategic Management Process and Drivers
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 effected.
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 marketplaces and increased national and international regulation have forced change upon organizations at a rate never before seen. This increased the pressure on management to develop adaptive strategies in order to stay in competition and even to stay in existence. Strategies, overall, are the means by which longterm objectives are intended to be achieved and could include geographic diversification, product development, service differentiation, acquisition of other organizations, divestitures, retrenchments, or even liquidation.
Strategic management is an attempt to utilize existing knowledge to forecast the outcomes of events and the degree to which they can be influenced by management actions.
The start of the new millennium is typified in the computer industry by a "merger mania" with the old practice of single portfolio suppliers giving way to problem and solution-based vendors. Information vending is becoming the future direction for all. As far as the technology itself is concerned, it may be classified as:
- Hardware getting cheaper
- Communication bandwidth getting wider
- Software getting more powerful
- Users getting more confused
Storage capacity is rocketing and network costs are reducing to virtually nil while PC operating systems have become mainframe-like in their sophistication. This combined with businessfs eagerness to embrace technology as an enabling tool has resulted in the fundamental shifting of the manner in which business is done. Thus we see the advent of corporate structuring of data warehouses to gain strategic advantage by being the best around at converting data to information and information to insight. In addition, technology such as electronic data interchange (EDI) has shortened the business cycle beyond previous comprehension. E-commerce is another such revolution which will, over the next few years, have much the same impact on conventional business as supermarkets had on the corner shop
Source: Auditor’s guide to information systems auditing, Richard E. Cascarino 2007
