چارچوبی برای تدوین استراتژی مبتنی بر روش خوشه بندی: یک مطالعه موردی در سازمان شرکت های بزرگ

Recent corporate organizations are significantly more complicated than ever. They are more distributed and networked, as supply chains, virtual organizations and corporate arrangements. By increasing the complexity of the decision making in dynamic competitive environment, managers need relevant strategic plans for their firms. In this paper, a new framework for strategic formulation based on clustering approach has been proposed to cope with these intricacies. After exploring internal and external factors influencing the goals of the organizational departments, the goal–factor matrices are formed based on their correlations. A clustering approach is applied to integrate goal–factor matrices to fulfill incorporate interactions among departments. Strategies would be formulated for clusters instead of departments individually or as organization totally. In fact, management by objective (MBO) has been substituted by management by cluster (MBC). The capability and usefulness of the proposed framework are shown through a case study in National Iranian Oil Company Training Center. Results indicate that the proposed strategic formulation outperforms other approaches and is very promising not only for solving the organization’s problem, but also is appropriate for utilizing in other corporate organizations.

The role and importance of strategy formulation in corporate organization is a keen subject of challenging area for both academics and practitioners. Due to frequent and significant environmental changes and enhancing complexities in organizational structures, strategy formulation has become more sophisticated in practice. Therefore, generating effective strategies are a critical issue for strategic managers. A corporate organization consists of multiple departments which act individually for achieving organizational goals through departmental goals. Departments may have different goals possibly with some conflict among them. Moreover, a great amount of internal and external factors as strength, weakness, opportunity and threat (SWOT) would be extracted from environmental survey. Consequently, strategy formulation for such organization is ever complicated than usual. Many organizations utilize MBO approach with respect to the dynamic situation and rapid development. Although, they set goals for their departments in line of the organizational goals, the deviation from their departmental or organizational goals is most likely to occur. So, in strategy formulation it is of importance to prevent the deviation issue. Accordingly, to overcome this and generating appropriate strategies, the process will be even more complicated and effort intensive. Hadighi and Mahdavi [1] utilized clustering algorithm for strategy formulation but there were several deficiencies namely, (1) the emphasis was on an organization with plenty of goals, and it does not satisfy the organizations incorporating several departments and possibly with some conflicting goals, (2) by utilizing Mahalanobis Taguchi Systems some factors were eliminated which may cause losing a set of variables improperly, (3) the interactions among factors of one department relating to other departments based on organization goals were not considered. But, in this paper first the clusters in an individual department would be configured and then expand to the whole organization, and (4) since the experts were from different sections of organization (not departments), there were plenty of factors and goals with diverging ideas, so there were significant conflicts among them and for overcoming this issue here, first we collected ideas from intra-department and then after promotion of generated clusters in departments, the clusters have been integrated till the consensus is achieved among experts. In fact the convergences of idea at this stage took place. In this paper, for overcoming the problems stated above a framework based on clustering algorithm has been proposed for strategy formulation of corporate organization. By considering the complexities and obstacles and in accordance with correlations among factors and goals in each department the factor–goal matrices would be formed. Based on the matrices the relevant departmental clusters are generated. Having promoted the generated individual clusters, organizational clusters’ integration will be performed. Then, we formulate the strategies based on the generated integrated organizational cluster. This framework assists to mobilize utilities from human to material resources in achieving organizational goals. The main contribution of this paper could be highlighted as follows: 1. Proposing a new framework for strategy formulation based on the clustering approach. 2. Presenting a new clustering method based on the correlation between departmental factors and goals. 3. Proposing a new MBC approach instead of MBO approach to prevent deviation of departmental goals from organizational goals. 4. Maximizing utilization of resources by integrating departmental goals as a set of organizational goals. 5. Considering the interaction among all factors and goals of the organizational departments, comprehensively. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a review of the literature on strategic formulation and clustering techniques. Section 3 presents the proposed clustering method of the strategy formulation. In Section 4, the framework of the strategy formulation is described. Section 5 explores the implementation process of the proposed framework for strategy formulation in the Mahmoudabad Training Center as well as the corresponding experimental results. To evaluate the proposed method against contemporary approaches, Section 6 includes validation and comparison. Finally, Section 7 provides concluding remarks.

In this paper, a new framework has been proposed for strategy formulation of corporate organization. A clustering approach was applied to develop strategy formulation by clustering factors and long term goals based on impact of factors on individual goals. Then, the strategies were generated for each cluster individually instead of the whole organization. The capability and applicability of the proposed framework has been shown through a case study in National Iranian Oil Company’s Training Center. Results indicate that the proposed strategy formulation outperforms other approaches and is very promising not only for solving the problem, but also for utilizing in other corporate organizations. Thereby, the main advantages of the proposed framework can be stated as follows: I. Utilizing an efficient data mining method forclustering corporate organization into various clusters. II. Developing a new strategy formulation method for corporate organization which contains variety of departments. III. Considering interactions among all goals and factors regardless of belonging to which department. IV. Partitioning organization into different clusters based on the impact of each factor on individual goals. V. Allocating departmental resources based on homogeneous strategies generated from integrated organizational clusters. Here, a new strategy formulation was proposed for corporate organization. It is most likely that this approach is suitable for huge organization. Another stream that could be developed is implementation phase. Since, resources were belonging to the departments and not the clusters, the share of individual department resources should be considered. For future research, applying other methods of clustering such as evolutionary methods, model-based clustering or constraint-based clustering could be used.