Using Information Technology to Implement Strategic Systems Planning as a Knowledge-Based Group Support Process

“Strategic systems planning” has been proposed as a means of achieving the full potential of strategic decision support systems (SDSS) (King, 1983, 1988). It is a systematic method which can be used by strategic managers to explicitly derive a statement of an organization’s overall strategy as well as of an organization’s SDSS strategy. This paper describes how knowledgebased support for strategic systems planning can be implemented using current information technology and utilized by organizational planning groups. Central to the implementation of this approach is the interaction between strategy set developers (who act as experts in developing strategy statements), a knowledge engineer, and an inference engine. Use of the inference engine to ensure the logical consistency of managers’ thought processes is a primary benefit of this approach. In addition, the approach indirectly supports the creative thinking of managers by requiring that underlying assumptions in reasoning be explicitly identified and tested in the context of the organization’s planning environment.