Search results

In their recent client engagement experience and benchmarking research, the authors have found that successful management models for corporate real estate (CRE) organisations begin with integrated, robust processes, and not well designed organisational charts. As corporate missions can quickly change focus from high growth to cost reduction, the key to successful integration of all CRE elements is engaging in a strategic planning process that not only aligns the facilities infrastructure with the core business, but also drives CRE organisational initiatives relative to processes, people and enabling systems. This paper attempts to capture a practical framework for CRE managers to evaluate changes to the core business and determine what implications these changes will have on both the CRE portfolio and organisation.

This paper aims to understand the conceptualisation of the notion of transformational government that is emerging within the electronic government domain. It reviewed how transformational government is manifest in the policy and strategic commitments of government departments in South Africa. The study focused on understanding the role of public sector planning towards the attainment of transformational government.

The study is interpretive and qualitative in nature. It provides the outcomes of a deductive thematic analysis conducted on strategic documents of government departments to explore their alignment and support for transformational government.

The paper argues for the need for public sector planning that is focused on citizen benefit realisation. The results highlight the significance of strategic plans for developmental transformation. However, the planning instruments were found to have an inconsistent orientation towards transformational government.

The study is significant in light of the implications of public policy and the associated strategic plans for citizens. This paper also contributes to research on the nascent area of transformational government.

In 1999, the governor of Illinois mandated strategic planning in all state agencies, the creation of an Office of Strategic Planning (OSP) and the formation of an academic advisory council to guide it. This article discusses how agencies responded, while focusing on the behavior of the various actors involved: agency staff, top management officials and the organizations themselves. It covers key interim agency results, and general outcome indicators for the eight state strategic issues. The State is now at the crossroads. It has a newly elected governor from a different political party and the OSP and academic advisory council no longer exist. Will a new movement of strategic planning and performance metrics make a real difference to the citizens of Illinois?

It has been widely projected in the library literature that a substantial number of librarians will retire in the near future leaving significant gaps in the workforce, especially in library leadership. Many of those concerned with organizational development in libraries have promoted succession planning as an essential tool for addressing this much-anticipated wave of retirements. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that succession planning is the wrong approach for academic libraries. This chapter provides a review of the library literature on succession planning, as well as studies analyzing position announcements in librarianship which provide evidence as to the extent to which academic librarianship has changed in recent years. In a review of the library literature, the author found no sound explanation of why succession planning is an appropriate method for filling anticipated vacancies and no substantive evidence that succession planning programs in libraries are successful. Rather than filling anticipated vacancies with librarians prepared to fill specific positions by means of a succession planning program, the author recommends that academic library leaders should focus on the continual evaluation of current library needs and future library goals, and treat each vacancy as an opportunity to create a new position that will best satisfy the strategic goals of the library. In contrast to the nearly universal support for succession planning found in the library literature, this chapter offers a different point of view.

The purpose of this original research is to gauge the level of academic libraries' strategic credibility by analyzing whether strategic planning goals align with annual reports.

A modified replication of a study by Jarvenpaa and Ives was used. A random sample of 28 ARL libraries was taken from ARL membership. Library directors were contacted for a copy of both a strategic plan and an annual report. A two‐way comparison was conducted between three groups using content analysis.

Analysis of strategic plans and annual reports revealed that the majority of the libraries in the study produced strategic plans. However, most libraries no longer produce annual reports. Canadian strategic plans were user‐centered, whereas US plans focused on “hot topics”. Themes emerged from the analysis of strategic plans including space planning, offsite storage, assessment, development, and personnel.

Determining the level to which ARL libraries have strategic credibility is difficult to surmise, since the anticipated number of annual reports did not materialize. Further research is needed to compare what impact strategic plans and marketing strategies have on fundraising.

Several tactical methods libraries can implement in order to get the attention of potential donors and funding agencies to support projects and programs include the hiring of a library development officer, contracting with a marketing firm, and greatly improving the quality of communication to clientele.

The paper presents original research and is of value to academic library leaders who want to know about current trends in communicating strategic goals and objectives to their clientele.

This article addresses a key issue: is strategic planning rewarded by the stock market? Using event‐study methodology, this article examined the market values of companies during the time period that they revealed information about their strategic planning focus, function or orientation. The results indicate that the stock market favors the long range‐planning horizon adopted by companies.

Strategic plans are developed and executed by businesses in order to chart a course toward an idealized future destination for the organization. Normally, this means aspiring to become an industry leader or niche holder by increasing market share, developing customer loyalty, penetrating new markets or some other defined goal that is ultimately premised on growth in revenue attainment. Because of the competitive nature of business and the environmental changes that have occurred and continue to occur at an increasing rate, marketing has become a key functional area within most enterprises' strategic plans. Today's strategies require the development of plans that embrace customer engagement in an effort to increase revenue. As such, marketing is fast becoming a critical functional area surrounding the development and execution of a strategic plan. Examining marketing's role in strategic planning, as well as the critical thought work conducted by marketing and sales personnel as they influence organizational cultures that are friendly to implementing competitive strategy and planning activities, is useful for libraries if they wish to engage in beneficial and viable strategic planning of their own. Unfortunately, libraries as non‐profit service organizations are rarely in a position to create revenue based strategies. Instead, libraries must focus on strategies that encourage value creation. Additionally, in the absence of a dedicated, full‐fledged marketing group within a library, it becomes vital that such non‐profit service organizations develop replacements or similar organizational analogs for integrating marketing functions while at the same time developing a marketing‐like, patron‐centered orientation and culture required for successful market‐based strategic planning. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

Informed by the two authors' combined extensive experience in both the theoretical and practical applications of sales and marketing, the paper discusses the current trends in market planning, especially those aimed at utilizing the marketing function as a critical element of strategic planning and execution.

The paper finds that libraries that engage in strategic planning can incrementally improve their chances of success during the execution of that plan if they make an effort to include the marketing process throughout the development and execution of such plans. Additionally, since marketing and its implied customer orientations provide a strong conduit to an organization's understanding of customer needs and perceptions of value, library strategic planning that incorporates traditional marketing elements and tactics like environmental scans, customer value creation and promotion of unique benefits will provide the best foundation for competitive library strategic plans.

The authors rely on their practical and theoretical experience in marketing and planning to convey a more purposeful sense of library strategic planning that includes library marketing as a required element in order to foster strategic planning success.

The paper shares specific ideas regarding the purpose, role and benefits of strategic library marketing that are connected to improving the likelihood of long term strategic planning success, especially when such plans are aimed at increasing perceptions of library value.

The linkage between strategic planning and daily activities within an organization is often obscure. Perhaps as a consequence, many well‐developed strategic plans fail to be implemented, and required goals and objectives are not attained. Strategy deployment processes link strategic plans with implementation activities. Instead of investing more time and energy in improving planning or implementation processes, an organization should first examine the deployment processes used to link strategic plans with action – “deployment processes” may be the missing link in the strategic management system. This paper studies the application of formal strategy deployment processes within three US federal agencies. The strategic management literature provides the basis for the deployment processes analyzed in this study. Following the analysis of each individual case, an overall assessment of existing supporting and restraining forces that should be considered when working to improve deployment processes is discussed.

This article reviews some of the literature on strategic human resource development focusing in particular on the characteristics of such activities, conditions necessary for the promotion of HRD and the possible benefits to an organisation pursuing such activities. Empirical evidence is presented on HRD policy formulation and planning processes in Irish High Technology companies. In conclusion a number of critical issues are considered which must be focused upon by organisations wishing to develop a strategic focus in their HRD activities.

Using the hyperbolic discounting approach in qualitative manner, the purpose of this paper is to explore the linkage of the time preference bias towards the too early execution of strategic focused planning. The paper also investigates the role of psychological bias in explaining the early execution.

This research use qualitative methods to explore the role of hyperbolic discounting in driving the psychological bias towards too early strategic scenario planning, and its rationalization. The authors conducted a face‐to‐face survey going door‐to‐door of the small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). The samples in this research are Indonesian SMEs from the northern part of Sumatra.

This research found most of the SMEs' managers are time preference biased due to hyperbolic discounting. This hyperbolic discounting awoke manager's psychological bias and resulted in too early decision making. This psychological bias might be due to prospect theory, or the representative effect, or framing bias, or the adaptive bias.

The sample is only taken from Northern part of Indonesia. To have a robust generalization, the research should be conducted in the whole of Indonesia.

This paper can be used by practitioners to understand their behaviour towards strategic decision making. Further, practitioners will know if their time preference bias will not generate better result.