Contemporary Strategic Management
You have been hired as the new Head of Strategy in a leading incumbent organisation. As part of a welcome message to be shared with organisational stakeholders, you have been asked to write a critical essay on ‘the contemporary strategic management field’.In the essay, demonstrate a critical understanding by using evidence of reading and utilise examples to support points where appropriate. Examples can be drawn from any industry or sector.
Strong answer
- Good structure, a short and sharp introduction for each topic, adequate background to why the topics are important, and suitable use of sub-headings to outline key points/themes. Overall, it is well balanced, coherent, and shows an original discussion of the topic and what are (perceived to be) its key points.
- Clear demonstration of opinion and perspective. Often takes a particular viewpoint which shows a critical approach (e.g., ‘it is essential to begin to develop these capabilities’). The narrative is engaging and convincing.
- Balances rich description with comparing and contrasting of points (e.g., practices of agile leaders summarised from across literature, weighing up the pros and cons of platform business models whilst offering some opinion).
- A nice, unique focus in both parts of the essay – in the first, the focus on what firms need to do before going agile is novel and includes some helpful examples. In the second, the explication of trends and model types offers a useful and holistic view of platform strategy.
- This leads onto concise conclusions offering some brief guidance/recommendations. More time might have been spent on these, but it is really a balancing act of using words through the answer. The main body is very comprehensive.
- Consistent use of examples and sound engagement with further reading (some direct quotes, but missing page numbers).
- Makes full use of the word limit.
strategy and digitalisation
Name
Course
Institution
Date
Contemporary strategic management
In the first part of this essay, I will focus on the contemporary strategic management field and link this with digital strategies. In the past, strategic management focused more on profit maximization and competitiveness, but the contemporary strategic management field focuses on more issues such as value creation and addition. Managers have to make strategic decisions that will enhance an organization’s competitive advantage (Porter. and Millar, 1985). However, they still need to adapt to new changes and focus on flexibility, agility, and dynamism to ensure an organization is competitive on different fronts. Managers implement strategies that help maintain relevance, differentiation and value creation by integrating the business and IT strategies. One of the issues that now receive attention in contemporary strategic management is incorporating IT and digital strategy in strategic decision-making.
IT is now one of the key drivers of economic growth. Managers cannot ignore the significance of adaptability to change in influencing how they incorporate digital strategies in an organization. Since digital transformation has influenced changes in the workplace and the economy, managers need to identify and evaluate effective strategic responses and manage the changes. IT creates and drives value in an organization. However, yet fewer organizations have been able to leverage digital business strategies to increase synergy and meet an organization’s objectives more efficiently. Understanding the strategic value of IT is crucial to promoting digital innovation. It is necessary for companies to implement strategies that generate growth and create competitive advantage (Porter. and Millar, 1985).). Increasingly, organizations require integrating the business strategy with the digital strategy, but the successful ones are agile and able to adapt to new changes.
Strategies are necessary to pursue a position of competitive advantage, and companies not focus on accessing relevant ad timely data to support strategic decision-making. Technology makes it easier to get more information, but then the management also focus on aligning the business and information strategies more than ever before. It is essential to enhance an organization’s agility and the IT should be aligned with the business objectives so that it does not hinder the business model (Bharadwaj, Sawy, Pavlou & Venkatraman, 2013). Digitalisation to support business transformation ought to be carried out in an environment that allows flexibility and well integrated solutions.
Strategy and digitalisation
In the second part, I will focus on strategy and digitalisation where organisations use technology to create and maintain competitive advantages while also incorporating changes. There are rapid digital transformations in different industries and organizations require strategies to adapt to the changing world and use digital solutions. For instance, in the motor vehicle industry there have a tremendous adoption of technology to improve fuel efficiency and reduce environmental pollution. Companies in the motor vehicle sector are expected to be innovative and even as there are huge investments, there are big returns for those who are able to differ ate their products. There are different technologies, such as big data and algorithms for decision-making that can enhance business processes and improve competitiveness.
Big data
Increasingly, big data is used with other technologies in the digital transformation process. Even though, organizations seek to leverage analytics to get value, it is more complicated to achieve the desired outcome and it may be necessary for organizations to adopt changes (Günther et al., 2017). Organizations desire to utilize big data to full potential, but they may lack the knowledge and experience on how best to leverage big data. There is a link between big data analytics and improved business performance, but organizations require flexible structures that make it possible to integrate analytics
Big data is useful in business analytics and when there are flexible IT governance structures, it is more likely. Sometimes, organizations downplay the efforts required to adopt analytics projects successful and sustain the analytics strategy (Ransbotham, Kiron, Gerbert and Reeves, 2017). This is often the case when the organizations lack analytics expertise and data is not easily accessible (Ransbotham et al., 2017).
Günther et al., 2017 identify six issues surrounding realizing value from big data at different levels of organization
Working with big data in practice
* Inductive and deductive approaches to big data analytics
* Algorithmic and human-based intelligence