Information Management: 
Strategic Planning through Information Strategy

Introduction 

The importance of the information for the organisations today is universally accept, constituting, if not the most important, at least one of the resources that more influences the success of the organisations (Ward, 1990). The information is also considered and used in a lot of organisations as a structural factor and an instrument of administration of the organisation (Zorrinho, 1991), as well as an indispensable strategic tool to obtain competitive advantages (Porter, 1985). These type of organisations (based on information) are more and more common (Drucker, 1988). This mutation and evolution from a conventional organisations is vital for its survival.

As survival act before the constant need of adaptation of the organisations to the new situations, it has been attending a growing adoption of new drawing paradigms and organizational operation as "Engineering of the Organization" (Brown and Watts, 1992), "Total Quality Management" (Zultner, 1992), " Process Innovation " (Davenport, 1993), etc. All these new paradigms imply a growing valorization of the paper of the information and of the infrastructure that supports it in the drawing and operation of the organisation (Brown and Watts, 1992).

Generally speaking, Strategy is the group of operations preconceived to solve a situation, and, more specifically, in an organisational context, is the way to reach the objectives (Rue and Holland, 1989). Porter (Porter, 1980) defines strategy as the integrated group of actions that aim, in a durable perspective, to reinforce the cohesion and robustness of the organisation face to the competitors and, it results of a posture of strategic thought face to the future of the organisation. Strategic thought is a synthesis activity that involves intuition and creativity in obtaining a vision, a lot of times of diffuse limits and difficulties quantifiable and justifiable (Mintzberg, 1994).

The construction or identification of a vision, as a process of strategic thought, is a process that is not possible to formalise, being strongly intuitive and creative. It is fundamentally a process of decision that needs information both on the structure and the operation of the organisation, and on the atmosphere where the organisation operates (Mintzberg, 1994). Strategic information can be defined as the necessary information for the top managers to formulate visions and strategies, that is, the information with value for the creation and implementation of organisational strategies (Zorrinho, 1994). The information can be used with strategic ends in two situations. One is in the support of an organisational strategy already established. In these circumstances the organisational strategy dictates the requirements that TI/SI should satisfy. The other, is in the exploration of an opportunity offered by TI/SI as a basic component of a new strategy of the organisation. In these circumstances TI/SI contributes directly to the formulation of the strategy of the organisation.

The strategic management process can be broken down into five different components:

• selection of the corporate mission and major corporate goals
• analysis of the organisation’s external competitive environment to identify opportunities and threats
• analysis of the organisation’s internal operating environment to identify the organisation’s strengths and weaknesses
• the selection of strategies that built on the organisation’s strengths and correct its weaknesses in order to take advantage of external opportunities and counter external threats
• and strategy implementation.

In the traditional view, each cycle of the process begins with a statement of the corporate mission and major corporate goals. External analysis, internal analysis and strategic choice follow the mission statement. In practice, however, that sequence is likely to hold true only for formulating and implementing intended strategies.

Emergent strategies arise from within the organisation without prior planning that is, without going through the steps, as noted earlier, in a sequential fashion. However, top management still has to evaluate emergent strategies. Such evaluation involves comparing each emergent strategy with the organisation’s goals, external environment opportunities and threats, and the organisation’s internal strengths and weaknesses. The objective is to assess whether the emergent strategy fits the organisation’s needs and capabilities. In addition, Mintzberg stresses that an organisation’s capability to produce emergent strategies depends on the kind of corporate culture fostered by the organisation’s structure and control systems.

In other words, the different components of the strategic management process are just as important from the perspective of emergent strategies as they are from the perspective of intended strategies. The formulation of intended strategies is basically a top-down process, whereas the formulation of emergent strategies is a bottom-up process.

As Mintzberg has noted, strategies can take place in different situations, virtually whenever people have the capacity to learn and the resources to support that capacity. In practice, the strategies of most organisations are probably a combination of the intended and the emergent. The message for management is that it needs to recognise the process of emergence and to intervene when appropriate, killing off bad emergent strategies but nurturing potentially good ones. To make such decisions, however, managers must be able to judge the worth of emergent strategies. They must be able to think strategically.