شناخت مفاهیم مدیریت استراتژیک : رویکرد فرایند تحلیل شبکه ای

This paper presents an approach to the identification of an organization’s strategic management concepts (SMCs) – mission, vision, values and competences. The highly qualitative relationships among these concepts are operationalized using the Analytic Network Process (ANP). As ANP captures the outcome of dependence and feedback between components of elements, the proposed approach enables us to handle indirect relationships and complex interactions existing among the SMCs. The alternatives with the highest overall priorities, resulting from the ANP, are selected as the organization’s most dominant SMC set. To improve the quality of the decision further analysis of the ANP results is suggested. Accordingly, alternative concept sets are derived by applying two approaches – bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach indicates an explorative perspective where only common values and core competences held by the organization are used to identify the corresponding mission and vision statements. On the other hand, the top-down approach indicates a normative perspective where the necessary values and competences are determined according to a given desired vision statement. The proposed ANP approach has been applied to the Industrial Engineering Department (IED) of Istanbul Technical University. In light of the dominant, bottom-up and top-down sets, a final set of SMCs has been suggested for the IED.

In strategy research, the importance of strategic management concepts has long been discussed and recognized to hold the potential to lead to business success. Following Ghauri and Gronhaug (2002), strategic management concepts are defined here, in a broader sense, as the building blocks of any theory or model in strategic management research. This paper deals with the following common SMCs: mission, vision, scenario, value and competence. Table 1 presents basic definitions of these concepts, which are of greater value when they are considered as a whole. SMCs together, provide a common language and allow for understanding the business and its position in the competitive environment, the values that guide the organization’s actions, and the organization’s direction and aspirations for the future (Raynor, 1998).In this context, each SMC can be imagined as a piece of a strategy puzzle. Since it is crucial to put all the pieces of a puzzle together in order to see the big picture, it is vital that the relationships among the SMCs are well defined, which in turn leads to an improved understanding. Therefore, a better insight into basic strategy processes requires a critical review of both the SMCs and their relationships. Various approaches have been used to identify the SMCs. Most of them employ informal small group processes, and do not follow a formally recognized methodology. But more important is that they develop and identify the SMCs as if they were independent of one another or they consider the relationships only implicitly. For a review of alternative approaches the reader should refer to O’Brien and Meadows (2001) and Raynor (1998). To identify an organization’s SMCs this paper suggests taking all basic relations among the concepts into account. Accordingly, we propose an analytic modeling and measurement process to operationalize the relationships. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First, we provide a conceptual framework that forms the theoretical basis of the proposed approach. Next, we present the Analytic Network Process (ANP) model and steps of the analysis followed by the bottom-up and top-down approaches proposed for further analysis. The process is, then, illustrated by an application in a university department. And finally, the contributions and limitations of the proposed approach are summarized.

Vision, mission, values and competences are important concepts in strategic planning and management. Although the identification of these concepts requires the executives to scrutinize the relationships among them, they are generally ignored or implicitly considered. This article provides an approach that analyzes the relationships and complex interactions among the SMCs, and thereby supports the decision on the final set of SMCs. In order to operationalize the relationships, a conceptual framework and a corresponding ANP model has been constructed. The results of the ANP model present the most dominant SMC alternatives, yet there is also a need to determine the desired and feasible alternatives. Therefore two complementary approaches (i.e. top-down and bottom-up) has been developed for further analysis of the results. The proposed approach was demonstrated by an application to the Industrial Engineering Department of Istanbul Technical University. The contributions and limitations of the proposed approach can be summarized as follows. The highly intuitive relationships inherent in the conceptual framework are operationalized using relative measurements. The approach allows analyzing not only the direct impacts, but also the complex interactions and indirect relationships between the concepts. Furthermore, the process facilitates collective participation and structured discussions of a variety of decision makers and provides a measure of consistency that enables to improve the overall consistency of the judgments. The proposed top-down and bottom-up approaches makes the analysis of particular subsets of alternatives possible (e.g. including only those vision statements desired by the organization instead of all), which in turn helps to improve the quality of the final decision. On the other hand, before the proposed approach can be applied it needs the SMC alternatives to be developed in advance. Therefore, the approach basically plays a complementary role in identifying SMCs. Moreover, the high number of comparisons required to develop the judgment matrices is an important disadvantage of the ANP. In this paper, a clustering method suggested by Saaty (2001b) is used to partially overcome this drawback.