On the Nature of Information Systems Strategy Development

Most large organisations have developed one or more IS strategies in the past decade. A great variety of approaches have been tried. The paper addresses the choice of approach at the outset of an IS strategy development exercise. Based on his experience of developing strategies, the author suggests there are two key choices: whether the strategy development process should be conventional or participative and whether the method should be data or decision orientated. The contextual factors that should be considered when making these choices are identified and five stage learning model for IS strategy development is proposed.