Strategic Success, Supply Chain Performance, and Social Media: The Impact of New Technologies

Strategic Management And Planning

Strategic management is defined as the art and science of formulating, implementing, and evaluating cross-functional decisions that enable an organization to achieve its objectives. Strategic management in this article is used synonymously with the term strategic planning. Sometimes the term strategic management is used to refer to strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, with strategic planning referring only to strategy formulation (David, 2013).

Strategy formulation includes developing a vision and mission, identifying an organization’s external opportunities and threats, determining internal strengths and weaknesses, establishing long-term objectives, generating alternative strategies, and choosing particular strategies to pursue. Strategic formulation requires effective and efficient communication to all stakeholders. Strategy implementation requires a firm to establish annual objectives, devise policies, motivate employees, and allocate resources so that formulated strategies can be executed often called the action stage. Strategy evaluation, the final phase of strategic management is reviewing external and internal factors that are the bases for current strategies, measuring performance, and taking corrective actions. The conceptual model for this article is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Strategic management process

Even the best formulated strategy will not be successful unless the employees and related stakeholders understand the strategy and commit to implement the strategy. This requires that the strategies should be communicated to these stakeholders. The ability to use social media to enhance communication and provide a level of information sharing that is not possible without the use of technology and social media can be a powerful contributor to strategic success.