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Integration between business planning and information systems planning has been found to have a significant impact on the extent of information systems contribution to organizational performance. Based on a content analysis of strategic IS/IT plans in Norway, the extent of integration was studied. This paper evaluates ten integration mechanisms and four integration stages. Most of the organizations practiced sequential and reciprocal integration. Furthermore, this paper investigates technology exploration and exploitation in different value configurations. Statistical analysis indicates that value shops and value networks are more concerned with technology exploration than value chains.

Even though intuition is recognized as imperative in strategic thinking management literature is surprisingly silent on the issue. This inquiry thus provides an historical and hermeneutic review of philosophical, psychological and management theory on intuition. It reveals that philosophers conceive intuition as rational while psychologists tend not to. Philosophers do so primarily because intuition is anchored in Ideas, Forms and Archetypes, which are perceived as a priori laws governing and conditioning all existence. The argument is that intuition is the ontological foundation for any normative theory of rationality. Implications for the rationality debate are discussed. Three levels of intuition are discerned and contrasted with analytical thinking. The first and second levels correspond to intuitions from the personal and collective unconscious experience respectively. They can be either introverted or extraverted. The third level corresponds to what some philosophers call the non-dual, integral state of mind. An empirical study including personal interviews with 105 Norwegian top managers indicate that in strategic thinking more emphasis is put on intuition than analysis, especially in exploration of new terrain and technology. They define intuition primarily in accordance with level one. In describing its key features they focus on foresight, new ideas and synthesis. Finally Myers Briggs Type Indicator ® was applied, revealing that they have a strong personality preference for intuition.

After many years of academic and scientific interest in the strategies of large enterprises, the situation has, not too many years ago, turned increasingly to the strategic behaviour of smaller enterprises. This is certainly justified, in fact essential, if we take into account the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises in the economies of most countries. Implementing strategic management in the current activity of the small enterprises has become a stringent necessity. This situation is a consequence of the serious challenges that exist on the market place, of the unstable balance of the business environment forces and other influencing factors that can be identified in the actual economic context, especially in the transition economies, where SMEs are very predominant and also very young and inexperienced (Lobontiu & Lobontiu, 2001). The existing literature on strategic management, whilst being difficult to reconcile in terms of the conflicting theories stated in the field, appears even further flawed in the SME context. On the other hand, if there is a single difference between the strategies of the SME and the large corporations, it is that they seem to be heading in different directions (MacGregor,

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. This article provides a contextual view of strategic knowledge processes in local government. Usually in local government studies knowledge processes are treated as black boxes, without much conceptual clarification and closer inspection. Most of the research is directed to broader governance issues or administrative and legal framework in which hardly any attention is paid to actual knowledge processes. There is also a range of empirical and descriptive studies on management issues in local government, but they seldom provide any information about how knowledge is created and processed in local government. On the other hand, due to new trends in management literature as well as the overall impact of information society development, this situation is likely to change. This article aims at shedding light on this neglected research field by providing conceptual tools for understanding the knowledge processes of strategic importance in local government. 1. Contextual Perspective Conte...

this paper, CVA may be viewed as having evolved from Porter's (1985) seminal discussion of the role of buyer-perceived value in shaping firm strategy. A number of CVA models have been advanced that allow the structural analysis of the perceived drivers of customer value (typically quality and price). Anderson and Narus (1998:54) discuss how businesses stand to profit from the resulting inferences gleaned from customer value models, and Gale (1994) reports that firms such as Fedex, AT& T, and Xerox have been able to improve firm performance through enhancing customers ' loyalties and reduce their churn rates

In recent years new ways of strategic thinking have been proposed. Naturally the Ansoffian and Porterian approaches are still acknowledged and respected. Nevertheless, increasing competition and globalisation of markets have claimed that the approaches presented by Ansoff and Porter are insufficient or even incorrect. Certain indications that the Mintzbergian approach would be more appropriate can be found, but also attempts to combine these exist. But what are really the remedies in strategic management (SM) that have been presented, as ‘schools of thought in SM’, over the years? Are they really different from each other? In this discussion the role of decision support systems (DSS) is emerging again as an effective tool, despite the early doubts over their significance. This paper is a review of early and current trends in strategic thinking and the possibilities emerging from developments in the field of DSS. 1.