Strategic Planning: Strategic planning is the art of formulating business strategies, implementing them, and evaluating their impact based on organizational objectives. The concept focuses on integrating various business departments (Accounting and finance, research and development, production, marketing, information systems, management) to achieve organizational goals.
The term strategic planning is synonymous with strategic management, only that the former is used in the corporate world and the latter in the academic setting.
Short-Range Planning: Short-range plans generally apply to a specific time frame in which a specific series of operations will be carried out, assessed, and measured.
The standard short-range plan will represent annual or semiannual operations with a short-term deliverable. These short-term plans cover the specifics of each day-today operation.
Business Planning: A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals.
It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals. Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, taxpayer, or larger community.
When the existing business is to assume a major change or when planning a new venture, a 3-to-5-year business plan is required, since investors will look for their annual return in that timeframe. The most common issues that are considered with business plans are as follows.
It is mainly concerned with providing and organization and its members an assistance to perform the routine tasks efficiently and effectively. One of the major issue before any organization is the challenge of meeting its goals and objectives. Strategic IS enable such organization in realizing their goals. Strategic Information System (SIS) is a support to the existing system and helps in achieving a competitive advantage over the organizations competitors in terms of its objectives. This unit deals with the critical aspects of the strategic information system. This units indicates the theoretical concepts and the way in which the same are realized in practice. The flow of the unit is in such a way that it starts with the development of contemporary theory about strategic uses of corporations’ internal information systems leading to systems which transcend the boundaries of particular organizations. The process whereby strategic information systems are created or identified is then examined. A number of weaknesses in the existing body of theory are identified, and suggestions made as to directions in which knowledge is or may be progressing. A strategic information system is concerned with systems which contribute significantly to the achievement of an organization’s overall objectives. The body of knowledge is of recent origin and highly dynamic, and the area has an aura of excitement about it. The emergence of the key ideas, the process whereby strategic information systems come into being is assessed, areas of weakness are identified, and directions of current and future development suggested.
Information system is regarded as a tool to provide various services to different management functions. The tools have been developing year by year and the application of the tool has become more and more diverse. In management it is now a very power means to manage and control various activities and decision making process. The original idea of automating mechanical processes got quickly succeeded by the rationalization and integration of systems. In both of these forms, IS was regarded primarily as an operational support tool, and secondarily as a service to management. Subsequent to the development, it was during the last few years that an additional potential was discovered. It was found that, in some cases, information technology (IT) had been critical to the implementation of an organization’s strategy.
An organization’s strategy supported by information system fulfilling its business objectives came to be known as Strategic Information System. The strategic information system consists of functions that involved gathering, maintenance and analysis of data concerning internal resources, and intelligence about competitors, suppliers, customers, government and other relevant organizations.