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Managing the Strategic Alignment of Organizations 77
without understanding the framework within which the alignment decision was
made. To understand the decision framework for strategic alignment is a prerequisite
to delivering successful alignment. The decision making process would affect
successful alignment of strategies and would have to include answers to questions
such as (Highsmith, 1999):
• What types of economic decisions need to be made?
• Who (person or group) makes each type of decision and how does it affect
the social issues involved?
• How does the organization create sustainable economic decisions?
The decision framework for strategic alignment should consist of contents,
context and process and should be followed closely. The content part is the
information and knowledge while the context part is the circumstances such as ecommerce,
economic and social impact and other events. Process defines how
participants during the strategic alignment process arrive at the decision of
approaching the alignment. The decision to purchase a software product with
known defects is an event that could affect strategic alignment. The circumstances
(all e-commerce investment plans such as quality goals and competition) provide
the context that shapes the decision to approach the alignment of all strategies.
IT FORECASTING PLANS FOR ECONOMIC AND
SOCIAL OBSOLESCENCE
It is hard to make honest forecasts without offending both those who prepare
them and those who receive them. The same is true about the alignment of the
strategies of the organization. As the organization approach a wave of alignment,
its time for honest estimates about the economic returns that organizations can get
from different uses of scarce resources - financially and human - in the next decade.
Short-term alignments might work out because it is easy to suppress the knowledge
that people affect the marketing of goods on the Internet. On the other hand, when
organizations align these strategies on the longer term, organizations tend to underpredict
the rate and extent of economic change because of the gap that exists.
Surrounded by in-place e-commerce assets that represent gruelling effort and
sizeable investment and endless sleepless nights to align the strategies, few of the
organizations are daring enough to say that the pioneering alignment of strategies
today could be tomorrow’s obsolete trash and the cycle will have to start all over
again.
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