And Strategy for All

by Jeff De Cagna, Guest Editor

For years, the creation of organizational strategy was considered to be the exclusive province of the CEO and his or her senior team. Those top leaders were viewed as the individuals best positioned and most capable of seeing all of the organization's strengths and weaknesses, as well as its opportunities and threats. To this way of thinking, staff members below the most senior levels of the organization had only one role with respect to strategy: unquestioned on-the-ground implementation.

The Knowledge Age, however, is changing the rules of the game. Today, developing and implementing strategy is a shared activity up, down, and across the organization. It is a necessary shift as it becomes increasingly important for workers at all levels to have a thorough understanding of the organization's strategy in order to facilitate more independent action. With the business environment moving as fast as it is today, it is impossible for senior executives to pull the organization's strategic levers effectively from their removed positions (as if they ever really could), making the effort to achieve consistent strategic agreement essential to capitalizing on emerging market opportunities.

In this new context, information professionals can and should be important contributors to the organization's on-going strategic work. This issue of Information Outlook examines issues of strategy with the information professional in mind. Professor and author Stuart Wells explains why strategic thinking is a critical capability in today's organizations. Al Jacobson and JoAnne Sparks illustrate how strategic focus can improve the effectiveness of the corporate information center. Joe Willmore explores the value of scenario planning in the process of crafting strategy. And in an interview about his new book, The Attention Economy, Tom Davenport explains why strategy should be seen as the challenge of properly allocating attention resources, and how information professionals can participate in fostering a more balanced approach.

We hope these articles will help you and your information professional colleagues to build your understanding of strategy, and will encourage you to become more actively involved in your organization's strategic initiatives. We hope you will share your new thinking and practices about strategy with us. Just drop us an e-mail at learning@sla.org. We look forward to hearing from you.