Rene Van Dinten

What is it about, what is the problem and what is our contribution to the solution?

A strategy is the result of a reiterative process that can be captured in a plan-do-check-act cycle (the PDCA cycle designed by Deming, based on an idea of Shewhart). This strategy development process is described in many different ways by consultancy firms, professionals and scholars in books and textbooks. Most organizations manage to formulate their strategy and if not, support is easily available from external experts.

Problems tend to start when it comes to the execution. Only few strategies are executed flawlessly. Rapid changes in the organization’s environment may be to blame, but this may also be due to a lack of necessary resources.

There are many kinds of blockades that can obstruct strategy execution. The most important blockades are found in the alignment between people. Insufficient funds to execute strategy can be another, but this is not the type of blockade that is relevant in the pursuit of strategic alignment. There is nothing to be aligned between people here. In this case the problem lies in the absence of a financial feasibility check of the strategy. This failure can be an indication of an alignment problem, but the shortage itself is not.

‘Strategic alignment’ refers to the process as well as the result of linking organizational strategy and corresponding objectives with every organizational unit and all employees. It is possible to expand strategic alignment to alliances with other organizations. This definition expresses a broad view on strategic alignment. It includes alignment between the organizational strategy and IT strategy of an organization (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993). The use of our definition makes it possible to drop ‘IT’ in the previous sentence and replace it with any other organizational function.

An organization that has managed to remove alignment blockades, often by successful interventions, finds itself ‘aligned’, meaning that strategy and operations are internally linked and connected with everyone expected to make a contribution. But, how is this achieved?

Optimizing strategic alignment is not just a top-down process. It requires vertical alignment, along hierarchical lines, but also alignment on a horizontal level, e.g. between organizational functions, teams or, outside the hierarchical lines, between supporting units. Furthermore, it is possible to reach strategic alignment in alliances with other organizations. In all cases, the improvement of staff capabilities needed for the strategy execution is vital.

This dissertation presents a model, the alignment blockades diagnosis instrument, making all these alignment blockades visible and attributing a value to every blockade in every alignment interface.

We can show these blockades on every desired level in the organization. The moment the level of alignment interfaces (between individuals) is dropped, these interfaces will always be aggregated to become sources of blockades. These help us understand the underlying problem, and can be helpful in making interventions more specific, effective and efficient. This is made possible by the fact that the values given to the blockades on a higher aggregate level result in a value on source level. As these values often differ, it may contribute to the legitimization and prioritization of interventions.

In order to show that the resulting alignment improvement is of great advantage to organizations, a set of linked instruments was designed showing the effect of the achieved alignment on the structural success (for companies: structural profitability) of the organization. The outcome contributes to a judgment on the strategy execution and subsequently contributes to a judgment on the excellence of the organization as a whole.