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sufficient drive and vision to sustain the ISP activity? Furthermore
it is envisaged that vital to the success of the SISP
activity would be boundary spanning activity. Individuals from
each organization must operate to articulate their organization’s
issues, concerns and needs to the team, while serving to
communicate ongoing progress and decisions of the team to
their respective organizations.
The history of the collaborators with respect to establishing
routine, transaction-based interorganizational systems may be
important in facilitating their migration to more strategic-type
IOS, and hence it could be argued, to SISP for alliances or
networks. We suggest also that the learning involved in
establishing operational level IOS is an important precursor to a
willingness to establish more strategic level connections. Thus it
might be expected that a successful history amongst the
collaborators in the planning and development of a specific
system may be necessary before there is a willingness to engage
in any interorganizational SISP.
New techniques that emphasize strategic thinking and positioning
as distinct from formal bureaucratic planning and that focus
on the nature and richness of partnerships and alliances with
suppliers, customers and business partners would also enhance
SISP for SBNs. While such techniques as value chain analysis
and critical success factors identification can be focused on the
external business network, they do not focus naturally on the
issue of the number and nature of synergistic partnerships that
are best for the organization.
However, techniques that focus on the positioning of the
organization in a network of relationships which include
customers as well as business partners and suppliers are a
valuable addition to the strategy process for the extended
enterprise. We shall be examining this in greater detail in
Chapter 11.
Arguably behavioural models of SISP need to change as well.
Too often it seems that SISP is regarded as a formal, finite
activity, done to produce a specific document (the IS plan), and
then is no longer done for some time. This view is completely at
odds with the view of the authors who see planning in turbulent
and uncertain times as a vital and increasing activity, such that
it permeates everyday thinking about IS/IT. Along with this
idea there is clearly a need for new thinking that emphasizes
strategy and positioning as distinct from formal bureaucratic
planning. This new thinking must focus on the nature and