Source / Reference:
1) "Strategic Alignment: Analysis of Perspective" by Preston Coleman and Raymond Papp 2006
1) "Strategic Alignment: Analysis of Perspective" by Preston Coleman and Raymond Papp 2006
Subject:
In Lect 4 - Which alignment strategy in SAM model is the best? and why?
======================================================================
Response:
In my opinion, there is no single one best alignment perspective. Different organizations may find different alignment perspectives align their problems better than others. Which perspective is the best depends on the nature of industry and the environment changes that the industries are facing. Moreover, if there is a single best alignment perspective, why all kinds of alignments are being used (figure 1) and fusion of perspectives arise? If there is really a best perspective, people should have abandoned all other perspectives and follow the only best perspective. That implies organizations cannot determine which perspective is the best one and they keep changing the use of alignment perspective from time to time in order to improve their business.
 | |||
| figure 1: alignment perspective by industry |
The Strategic Alignment Model (SAM) is composed of four quadrants, each of them consists of three components. It concerns about both the scopes of business and the information technology of organization. The four quadrants are business strategy, organizational infrastructure, IT strategy and IT infrastructure (figure 2). It includes both the internal and external aspects of business and IT. An alignment perspective is combination of 3 of the quadrants form the SAM. It describes the strength, weakest-link and the area that will be affected after re-alignment of the organization. Since it only concerns one weak area of the organization, if the firm has more than one weak aspect, at least one of these aspects will be ignore and may lead to vital error or even failure.
Nowadays, most of the organizations and industries integrate business and IT to eliminate competitive disadvantages and create competitive advantages to strengthen their market position and enlarge their market shares. Since all four quadrants of SAM concerns about different aspects of the organization and no over-lapped aspects between them, people should not ignore any quadrants, all of the quadrants are very important to an organization.
Furthermore, most of the organizations not concern on only one type of product or service. Most of them provides more than one service and product, which blur the boundary between nature of industry and make classification of type of industry becomes very hard.
Like Amazon, it provides different kinds of services. As a world-wide online retailer, it sells books, furniture, toys and even digital music. The nature of market of these products are indeed very different, therefore the problems it is facing may also very broad. Thus the organization cannot use only one alignment perspective to align their problems.
For example, if Amazon use only competitive potential to expand its business and ignore it's IT infrastructure, it may develop some online shopping platform like the platform for selling digital music which is not convenient to use and cannot address the needs of customers, this may lead to business loss. On the other hand, if it just follow the service level, focus on IT and ignore the business strategy, the business will fail for sure as business scopes like competitors and services are ignored.
Environment of business and nature of the industry are mutually effect each other, this govern the use of strategic alignment too. For example, a printing firm have been using strategy execution to align with their business as it only focus on repeatable work and paper work. Since IT keeps developing, even it does not really require much IT, it should also focus on the IT strategy such as what are the latest printing and packing technology, to keep pace with their competitors in order to survive in the market and make business more effective by analyzing the business related technology.
To conclude, there is no a single best strategic alignment, it just depends on the business nature and how the environment is changing.
 |
| figure 2: strategic alignment model |
Nowadays, most of the organizations and industries integrate business and IT to eliminate competitive disadvantages and create competitive advantages to strengthen their market position and enlarge their market shares. Since all four quadrants of SAM concerns about different aspects of the organization and no over-lapped aspects between them, people should not ignore any quadrants, all of the quadrants are very important to an organization.
Furthermore, most of the organizations not concern on only one type of product or service. Most of them provides more than one service and product, which blur the boundary between nature of industry and make classification of type of industry becomes very hard.
Like Amazon, it provides different kinds of services. As a world-wide online retailer, it sells books, furniture, toys and even digital music. The nature of market of these products are indeed very different, therefore the problems it is facing may also very broad. Thus the organization cannot use only one alignment perspective to align their problems.
For example, if Amazon use only competitive potential to expand its business and ignore it's IT infrastructure, it may develop some online shopping platform like the platform for selling digital music which is not convenient to use and cannot address the needs of customers, this may lead to business loss. On the other hand, if it just follow the service level, focus on IT and ignore the business strategy, the business will fail for sure as business scopes like competitors and services are ignored.
Environment of business and nature of the industry are mutually effect each other, this govern the use of strategic alignment too. For example, a printing firm have been using strategy execution to align with their business as it only focus on repeatable work and paper work. Since IT keeps developing, even it does not really require much IT, it should also focus on the IT strategy such as what are the latest printing and packing technology, to keep pace with their competitors in order to survive in the market and make business more effective by analyzing the business related technology.
To conclude, there is no a single best strategic alignment, it just depends on the business nature and how the environment is changing.
