Strategy-technology connection.

Use in decision making

Author: Alan M Kantrow

Harvard Bus. Rev.;(United States) 58 (4), 1980

The past decade reveals managers'Growing awareness of the need to incorporate technological
issues within strategic decision making.They have increasingly discovered that technology and
strategy are inseparable. For technology has an inner logic that simply must be considered in a
company's strategic planning-that process of creating a concept of the business it is in,
identifying its goals and objectives and the long-term policies to meet them, and formulating
plans of action. Technology includes the elaborate systems of planning and production through
which a company's abstract capability is translated into the goods and services on which it
ultimately depends for success. More than 30 books and articles referenced by the author
express this increasing perception by managers of the need to place technological decisions in
the context of overall corporate strategy.

Some ten years ago Donald R. Schoen ably summarized for HBR readers the best thinking on
several closely related topics: the relationship of technology to organizational structure, the
apparatus of technological forecasting, and the characteristics of the innovative process.In
retrospect, his most telling observations may have been those which, in passing, revealed the
straitened condition of the literature.Of specialized writing in the various functional areas he
found no shortage. But of material on the “total process by which companies translate a
technological advance, an idea, or an invention into products, processes, or services” he found
very little.Until recently, the situation had only marginally improved. A Niagara of published
research inundated such topics as R&D management in individual research laboratories, reward
systems for R&D personnel, and techniques of R&D project evaluation. But the prospect for
material relating technological considerations to the strategic concerns of business long
remained Saharan.

Why? Three explanations suggest themselves.Researchers in specialized fields could not agree
about the kinds of more general questions to examine or the contexts in which to examine
them.Lacking a sense of common purpose, they naturally tended to restrict their work to the
data most familiar and most amenable to their particular expertise.The sheer pace and scope of
developments required a degree of technological knowledge rarely found in tandem with a keen
appreciation of the concerns of business.The type of individual, the common purpose, and the
disciplined knowledge on which any true business-oriented research on technology must rest—
all these have been slow to appear. Even today no universal agreement exists about which data
are relevant or which techniques of analysis are appropriate, although the area of disagreement
has narrowed.

But, at last, the right kind of individual is in place and at work: the researcher who is equally at
home with technical detail and entrepreneurial point of view.Granted all this, why should HBR
readers—even those in moderate-or high-technology companies—be interested in the evolving
shape and thrust of a body of research literature? Why should they care that disciplined
knowledge has slowly begun to appear in the fashion I am about to describe?The course of
research in any given field is both an agenda for still unanswered questions and a reflection of
how experience has so far yielded to understanding. It synthesizes scattered practice and insight
and raises both to the level of conscious, systematic endeavor much as an aerial photograph
distinguishes significant patterns in what from ground level appears unalleviated chaos.

References: https://hbr.org/1980/07/the-strategy-technology-connection

A. The past decade reveals managers' growing awareness of the need to incorporate
technological issues within strategic decision making. They have increasingly discovered that
technology and strategy are inseparable. For technology has an inner logic that simply must be
considered in a company's strategic planning-that process of creating a concept of the business
it is in, identifying its goals and objectives and the long-term policies to meet them, and
formulating plans of action. Technology includes the elaborate systems of planning and
production through which a company's abstract capability is translated into the goods and
services on which it ultimately depends for success. More than 30 books and articles referenced
by the author express this increasing perception by managers of the need to place technological
decisions in the context of overall corporate strategy.

B.Main idea-

it is advisable to include technological issues within strategic decision making.

C. Summary-

Technology includes the elaborate systems of planning and production through which a
company's abstract capability is translated into the goods and services on which it ultimately
depends for success. They have increasingly discovered that technology and strategy are
inseparable. Growing awareness of the need to incorporate technological issues within strategic
decision making

D. Reflection-
- To incorporate technological issues within strategic decision making.

- Technology and strategy are inseparable.

ANGEL MHAE APOLONIO