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Strategic Planning and Management |
Strategic Planning and Management using MapSys
Imagine that you have been appointed the CEO of a troubled company and you have been asked to turn it around? Where do you start? You probabaly need to understand what is going on. How do you do that?
One way is to look at the past performance of the organization and see how certain important variables have changed over time. It is obviously very useful to draw the past behavior of these variables as a function of time. In system dynamics, this is called a reference mode or behavior over time graph. You want to know how this behavior was generated in the first place. You know from system dynamic principles that behavior of a system is the result of its structure. So, you need to understand this structure and then hope to make changes to the structure in order to reverse its behavior.
Combining system dynamics with the well known resource based view of the firm gives us a powerful methodology for developing a strategic architecture of an organization (Competitive Strategy Dynamics, Kim Warren). According to this approach, the current performance of an organization is derived from the specific configuration of its resources. Moreover, the future behavior of the organization will depend on its future resources and capabilities.
In order to grow an organization, therefore, the managers must be able to reconfigure the resouces of the organization (internal and external) to generate new resources and capabilities. MapSys is well suited for developing a model that relates the organization's resources and capabilities to its performance. With such a model the managers will be able to investigate various policies and see their long term impact on the performance of the organization. This is very valuable as it allows the managers to test new policies before implementing them.
A simple example of how a model of an organization can connect various resources is shown below:
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