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Managing the Strategic Alignment of Organizations 73
According to them, this approach is an improvement because it enables
managers to move smoothly from one component to another by identifying and
understanding the possible courses of action in the different steps. What these
managers should keep in mind is that the four steps could affect the alignment of ecommerce,
although some of the external threats such as social impact and disasters
are difficult to control. Managers should acknowledge that these could affect
alignment of the strategies. Therefore, one should expect risk-reducing measures
will eventually enforce an alignment of strategies. The key to understanding strategic
risks is dependent on the organization’s ability to foresee long-term benefits from
a new system, assess the resources and capabilities of its potential competitors,
assess its own financial strength, and align its e-commerce strategy with its overall
business strategy (Bandyopadhyay et al., 1999).
Organizational strategy provides the vision of where any organization needs to
go. The problem is that many organizations focus too much on tactics and
operations, while the real value of e-commerce is to open new opportunities such
as economics and to enter new markets such as e-commerce to induce potential
customers to use the organization’s products. Organizations could directly derive
e-commerce and operational objectives from the overall objectives, ensuring
alignment of e-commerce and business strategies. One of the problems every
organization faces is that objectives and strategies can change according to market
dynamics such as economics and social changes.
At the strategic level, senior managers need a clear vision of the competitive
impact of e-commerce and how it will affect the alignment of e-commerce. Business
strategy provides the vision of where the organization wants to go. Most organizations
therefore focus on e-commerce (new revenue opportunities) to help the
organization becomes competitive and enter new markets. It should be possible to
ensure that technology objectives and operational objectives are directly derived
from the organization’s corporate objectives, ensuring that business and ecommerce
organizations are focused on the goals and that they are aligned.
Managers must keep in mind that a life cycle will provide a perspective of the
formulation of these strategies because each phase of the life cycle has distinct
characteristics that affect the operation of the business. Each one of these phases
could ‘experience’ a gap and managers should ensure that economic advantage
does not make these gaps bigger during any of these phases. These performance
gaps need managing; the organization should determine its overall market posture
considering its relative position in the industry.
To forecast the incremental advantage effect likely to result from implementing
alternative alignment planning, organizations should structure profile measures
concentrating on industry market potential, relevant industry sales and real market
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