Strategic Management in the Workplace Research Paper

Strategic Management
Name
Institution
Strategic management
Porter, (2008), in his book defines a strategy as a plan of action by the top managers of a company to achieve a desired long term overall goal. Strategic management is a top management level duty that involves the processes of analysing, formulating and implementing the major goals of an organization on behalf of its owners. It involves assessment of company resources and the internal and external environments in which an organization operates. It shapes a company’s overall direction and specifies its objectives, develops policies and action plans to achieve these objectives and ensures efficient allocation of resources to implement the set targets (Freeman, 2010). Accordingly, this paper seeks to discuss in details strategic analysis, formulation and strategic implications in Hi-Tech IT Solutions and the recommendations to improve the company’s strategic management.
Overview of the Company
My company goes by the name Hi-Tech IT Solutions, which provides innovative technological solutions to its clients. It provides products and services like IT manufacturing, integrated technology, cloud computing, business consultation and data analytics. These have helped it grow to gain a considerable market share in competition with other giant players in the technological industry.
Strategic Analysis
Strategic analysis involves using various tools to prepare business strategies through a careful evaluation of the opportunities and challenges encountered by a company in its effort to achieve its vision and goals. It entails an assessment of the internal and external environments of a business, the internal strengths and weaknesses and the potential opportunities and threats a business may encounter and the analysis of human and social capital available to a company. A favourable outcome in the analysis of the above factors leads to a company enjoying a competitive advantage over its rivals in the market.
Internal Environment Analysis
A company’s internal environment refers to factors within a company that affect its choices and productivity and the company has control over them. These factors include strength of employees, efficient management system, organization’s mission and vision statements, leadership styles and organisational culture (Wetherly, and Otter, 2011). These factors define the company’s direction and provide a competitive advantage to a firm. The company has strong mission and vision statements, which show its desired future position. The company’s desire to be the best provider of quality I.T solutions in the technological industry remains a strong driving force to forge on. This has prompted the company to provide a wide range of quality services and also consistent market researches to identify the dynamic needs of its clients in terms of speed, accuracy and efficiency in using our products and services.
The company enjoys support from committed and well-motivated employees who value our clients and provide quality services to them. This has helped the company greatly in retaining its clients, satisfying them and increasing their loyalty to our products and services. The company’s strong leadership styles of servant and conscious leadership have played a great role in ensuring efficient management of the company and its resources in realization of its goals. The employees and customers feel appreciated and treated well by their leaders thus increasing their loyalty. The company has strong cultural values that ensure its smooth running. It believes in respect, responsibility and delivery of quality to its stakeholders. The strict adherence of everyone to these values has created conducive environment for everyone to thrive in their specific areas.
External Environment Analysis
The external environment of a company refers to forces outside the company that affect its operations. The company usually has no control over these factors. These consist of unfavourable economic changes, stiff competition, unfavourable political environment, change in government regulations and other industrial factors (Wetherly & Otter, 2011). Hi-tech I.T Solutions has encountered these threats in its external environment. The stiff competition from other giant companies in the industry like Amazon, Google and IBM has posed great challenges to the company in increasing its growth and market share. The company has been forced to incur high costs in advertising, promotion and product differentiation, which significantly reduce its profitability.
The change in customers’ needs also poses a challenge to the company, as it has to keep on improving its products to meet the clients’ expectations. The government regulations on cyber security and system hackers for information theft has been a concern to the company as it has to come up with innovative solutions to curb this challenge in the technological industry in its quest to meet the government regulations.
SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis refers to acronym for a company’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. A company needs to maximize on its strengths, exploit the opportunities, and minimize its weaknesses and strengths to gain a competitive advantage in the market (Wetherly & Otter, 2011). Hi-Tech IT Solutions has the following strengths that have led to its growth and delivery of quality services and products to its clients. Our employees are well motivated and committed to help the company achieve its vision. This has led to quality service provision and satisfaction to our clients. The company’s culture of respect, responsibility and delivery of quality services has seen it to greater heights and good reputation in the eyes of the public building up on its image. Its strong leadership and efficient management have promoted its smooth running. A customer and employee centric approach and delivery of value to its stakeholders have increased the company’s profitability and competitive advantage in the market.
Despite the strengths, the company also has weaknesses that hinder its efficiency. These include inadequate finances due to its limited access to financial institutions as a result of its small size and collateral requirements. This has limited its efforts to expand and venture into other new markets. The lack of adequate technological equipments to fully embrace advancing technology has been a challenge to the company’s management. This is as a result of rapid changes in the technological world where some equipment become obsolete very fast and inadequate finances to replace them. Thirdly, the inadequate number of staff to serve the needs of wide scale range of clients has also hindered the company’s efforts to deliver personalised services on the clients’ premises. This has prevented it from enhancing customer’s convenience in accessing our products and services.
Business opportunities refer to those ideas that can be exploited to a company’s advantage. The market presents dynamic consumer needs, which seem to be favourable to our business. This includes new levels of cloud computing to enhance client’s convenience in their operations. Our company is meditating on establishing new methods to capture this opportunity. Due to the increased demand of our services by consumers, we are looking forward to increasing our staff so as to conveniently reach our clients. The availability of the shipping and transportation systems in the market can be harnessed to speed up delivery of our products and services to our customers to enable customer door-to-door delivery.
The market also posses threats that if not well managed can hamper the business growth and profitability. These threats include stiff competition from our main competitors, which hinder our efforts to dominate the market and a larger customer base. The loss of our major clients to our competitors could be a big blow to us. This is why the company is trying to keep abreast with the advancing technology in cloud computing to satisfy their needs, retain them and build their loyalty to the company.
Social and Human Capital Analysis
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