Defining Strategies and Interdepartmental Organizational Alignment

It is useful for the development of the discussion to share definitions on Strategies and Interdepartmental Organizational Alignment:

A strategy is therefore a fundamental pattern of present and planned objectives, resource deployments, and interactions of an organization with markets, competitors, and other environmental factors (Kerin et. al., 1990). At a rather similar pace Walker et. al.,(2003) contend that a strategy should specify:

1)What objectives to be accomplished,
2)Where exactly to focus (which industries and product-markets) and
3)How to allocate resources and activities to each product-market in meeting environmental opportunities and threats and gain a competitive advantage.

Walker et. al. (2003) further contemplate five major components of a well-developed strategy as critical in Marketing strategy implementation:

1) Scope reflecting to the breadth of corporate strategic domain (e.g. vision, mission). For example, corporate scope reflects on the number and type of served industries, available product lines, and market segments a firm competes or plans to enter.
2) Goals and Objectives. For example, performance oriented dimensions - Marketing Numerics.
3) Resource deployment in effectively and efficiently allocating financial and human resources.
4) Identification of a sustainable competitive advantage (see previous post).
5) Development of Interdepartmental Organizational Synergies.

Given the recasting of successful Marketing in terms of services and relationships excellence, and the key role played by service providers it becomes necessary to bring ideas from a number of disciplines (for example, Marketing, Operations and HRM together)– without successfully ‘aligning’ strategy and implementation, services and relational quality will be impaired and therefore potential for competitive advantage lost.

Labovitz and Rosansky (1997, pp.5) defined alignment “as both a noun and a verb – a state of being and a set of actions . . . alignment . . . refers to the integration of key systems and processes and responses to changes in the external environment”. Often the concept of alignment when used in business is referred to as strategic fit (Smaczny, 2001), strategic match (Mintzberg et al., 1998), or simply the interface between two things (van der Zee and De Jong, 1999). In fact, Beal and Yasai-Ardekani (2000, pp. 735) identified alignment as “moderation, mediation, profile deviation, gestalts, covariation, and matching”.