STRATEGY
Seeking and Securing Competitive Advantage
Edited by Cynthia A. Montgomery and Michael E. Porter
Harvard Business Review, 1991

More recently however, information technology organizations have been forced to question their own very existence. Many of the issues have been around for quite some time: decentralization of processing power and application knowledge, outsourcing of development and operations functions, growing maturity of the purchased package application arena, etc. Large systems integrators have created value adding umbrella functions over these service domains, and in the process, have created very real competition for once confident and embedded information technology organizations. Information technology managers are struggling to think about, and correctly act upon, these strategic changes in the industry. Today the quality practitioner must become conversant and skilled in the strategic skills of planning and implementing organizational change in order to continue to be perceived as value adding by information technology management.

To say that the quality practitioner must develop skills in strategic planning can raise more than a few eyebrows in most organizations. The idea of "strategic planning" carries many negative connotations among managers who have historically seen strategic planning reduced to a bureaucratic maze of meetings and reports that are quickly filed away once published, allowing work to return to the pre-planning norm. [Quality professionals will note that many similar connotations have begun to be attached to TQM.] In THE RISE AND FALL OF STRATEGIC PLANNING, Henry Mintzberg offers an extensive discussion of the roots of the various strategic planning models and his well-documented explanation for the failures and bad feelings associated with strategic planning. His conclusion is positive as illustrated by his subtitle, Reconceiving Roles for Planning, Plans, and Planners.

"People called planners can sometimes do strange things, just as strategies can sometimes result from strange processes. We need to delineate the word carefully if it is not be eventually dropped from the management literature as hopelessly contaminated." [pg. 7] Mintzberg seeks "to characterize planning by the nature of its process, not its intended result." In looking at this process, he finds what he believes is an underlying contradiction in planning, namely, that "the assumption underlying strategic planning is that analysis will produce synthesis: decomposition of the process of strategy making into a series of articulated steps, each to be carried out as specified in sequence, will produce integrated strategies." [13, author's emphasis]

Traditional strategic planning literature recognizes strategy in two forms. "Intentions that are fully realized can be called deliberate strategies. Those that are not realized can be called unrealized strategies." [24] What typically goes unrecognized "is the third case, which (he calls) emergent strategy, where a realized pattern was not expressly intended." [25] Because emergent opportunities fall outside of the formal planning process, and would violate the published plan, key ideas and opportunities are not only missed, they are actively avoided in the interest of implementing the plan. These missed opportunities, in hindsight, discredit the entire strategic planning process and profession.

Mintzberg encourages a combination of strategies. Management can "pursue what may be called umbrella strategies: the broad outlines are deliberate while the details are allowed to emerge within them. Thus emergent strategies are not necessarily bad and deliberate ones good; effective strategies mix these characteristics in ways that reflect the conditions at hand, notably the ability to predict as well as the need to react to unexpected events." [25]

Some of the central premises that Mintzberg feels have led to the current negative perception of strategic planning include: that the "management of strategy can be sharply separated from the management of operations, and the strategy formation process itself can be programmed." [23] In an argument currently echoed in the quality literature, strategic planning isn't something that can be done separately from line management, it constitutes the most important part of line management. If so, the role of the separate planner, or planning function, is drawn into question. Mintzberg's "contention is that many of the most important roles played by planners have nothing to do with planning or even plans per se." [361] He offers three "nonplanning roles of planners: as finders of strategies, as analyst, and as catalyst." [361] Like the quality professional, the professional strategic planner adds value to the organization by focusing a specific skill set on the need to facilitate an organization-wide process of change.

Mintzberg's work offers a transition piece between the traditional bureaucratic strategic planning processes, that have earned much disdain in the management community, and the modern emerging role of strategic planning and value-added planners. Cynthia Montgomery and Michael Porter's STRATEGY, from Harvard Business Review, offers an extensive anthology of contemporary thinking on strategic planning. Containing twenty-three of HBR's best writings on strategy and strategic thinking, STRATEGY offers a wealth of insight for preparing the quality professional to work on strategic terms with information technology managers who are themselves struggling with these issues.

Among the articles selected, "Crafting Strategy" [HBR, July-August 1987] offers Mintzberg's early views on strategic planning that hint at his current RISE AND FALL. "So-called strategic planning must be recognized for what it is: a means, not to create strategy, but to program a strategy already created - to work out its implications formally. It is essentially analytic in nature, based on decomposition, while strategy creation is essentially a process of synthesis." [416] It is in THE RISE AND FALL that Mintzberg goes beyond this negative characterization to discover the emerging and positive role for strategic panning and planners.

In "Information Technology Changes the Way You Compete" [HBR May-June 1984], F. Warren McFarlan offers his five questions for identifying whether or not information technology requires attention at the highest management levels: 1) "Can IS technology build barriers to entry?" [78], 2) Can IS technology build in switching costs?" [80], 3) "Can the technology change the basis of competition?" [80], 4) Can IS change the balance of power in supplier relationships?" [83], and 5) Can IS technology generate new products?" [83] Not one mention of system or application quality. Nothing about project schedules and budgets. McFarlan's complete focus is on the role of information technology in the strategic positioning of the business. What kind of questions are information technology quality professionals asking today?

A quality practitioner today must have the skill sets to think about, discuss, facilitate, and act upon strategic issues and planning within the information technology function. Anything less relegates the practitioner to tactical producer-oriented improvement activities while the real focus of change for information technology takes place above and around those changes. Montgomery and Porter's selections describe many of the perspectives that need to be understood and eventually mastered. However, Mintzberg's work should be considered a prerequisite. Unless the quality practitioner can help managers understand why their negative connotation of strategic planning is being unjustly applied to the current efforts, little strategy making will be possible. Mintzberg's analysis provides that explanation.

Strategic planners are seeing how important it is for a mature discipline to fight against the negative image it has developed in order to be given a chance to add value using its modern lessons learned. Quality practitioners can learn the same lesson.