Health Information Management: Integrating Information Technology ...

INFORMATION STRATEGY: AN INTRODUCTION 123
management and is about defining a unique position, making clear choices and
tightening fit. It also includes communicating the strategy to managers and
employees, in order to guide them in making day-to-day choices, which
influence the character of the company and the fit between its activities. Of
course, operational effectiveness is essential to a company’s survival, but it will
not provide a sustainable competitive advantage.
The topic of ‘strategy’ derives from the battle field: in the fourth century BC,
Aineias the Tactician already wrote about ‘How to survive under siege’. Whether
about military or business strategy, however, the common aim of the extensive
literature on strategy is how to outdo your opponent or competitor. Another
commonality in the longstanding tradition of strategy theories is that these works
primarily pay attention to the formation and content of strategies, assuming a
fairly unambiguous relationship between the strategy and the multitude of
organizational transformations that will eventually lead to the achievement of the
organizations’ objectives. There are at least two reasons to be critical about this
assumption. First of all, more than 24 centuries of discussion on the subject have
not brought any agreement among practitioners, scientists and theorists about a
common framework that can be built upon to derive strategies (De Wit and
Meyer, 1998). Second, practice has learned that most proposed strategies result
in unexpected and sometimes undesirable transformations and results. Given the
nature of technological and organizational change described in Chapter 2, this
should not come as a surprise: negotiations and contingencies typify any sociotechnical
change process of some scale.
As far as information strategies are concerned, they have the tendency to end
up in information infrastructures that look more like puzzles than the wellorganized
and properly aligned tools traditional views would like them to be
(Ciborra, 2000; see also Chapter 8).
If an unambiguous relationship between strategy and result is assumed,
choosing the proper theoretical framework is very important. This may explain
the lively interest management ‘gurus’ can count on; as if they can provide a
secret recipe that will give managers the key to certain competitive advantage. If,
however, as we would propose, this relationship is ambiguous at best, the
process of strategy formation, implementation and evaluation cannot be reduced
to simple ‘to do’ lists or recipes for success. What is less important, then, is the
exact theory or methodology an organization adheres to in developing its
(information) strategy. What is crucial, on the other hand, is to develop
organizational capacity which is able to deal with this ambiguity and to
understand the organizational characteristics and drivers underlying the (need for
an) information strategy. It is these issues that this and the following chapters
will focus on.
CASE STUDY
Case I: On Alignment or Fit: The UK—NHS procurement strategy