Identifying strategic management concepts: An analytic network process approach

This paper presents an approach to the identification of an organization’s strategic management concepts (SMCs) – mission, vision, values and competences. The highly qualitative relationships among these concepts are operationalized using the Analytic Network Process (ANP). As ANP captures the outcome of dependence and feedback between components of elements, the proposed approach enables us to handle indirect relationships and complex interactions existing among the SMCs. The alternatives with the highest overall priorities, resulting from the ANP, are selected as the organization’s most dominant SMC set. To improve the quality of the decision further analysis of the ANP results is suggested. Accordingly, alternative concept sets are derived by applying two approaches – bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach indicates an explorative perspective where only common values and core competences held by the organization are used to identify the corresponding mission and vision statements. On the other hand, the top-down approach indicates a normative perspective where the necessary values and competences are determined according to a given desired vision statement. The proposed ANP approach has been applied to the Industrial Engineering Department (IED) of Istanbul Technical University. In light of the dominant, bottom-up and top-down sets, a final set of SMCs has been suggested for the IED.