Strategy Needs Structure
Structure Needs Ontologies – Dynamic Ontologies Carry Meanings
Hannu Vanharanta
1
and Jussi Kantola
2
1
Industrial Management and Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Pohjoisranta 11, Pori, Finland
2
Industrial Management, Vaasa University, Vaasa, Finland
Keywords: Strategy, Strategic Management, Fuzzy Logic, Applications, Decision Support Systems, Ontologies,
Methodology, Statements, Evaluations.
Abstract: In our long-term research we have created a new management and leadership methodology, which can be
used for strategic management purposes to manage change and to lead the company resources efficiently
and effectively towards the new future. Our research methods are based on management and leadership
ontologies, with which we can capture the current and future views of personnel for use in strategy making
and strategic management. The evidence we have obtained originates from our research with our ontology-
based research instruments and test runs with fuzzy logic based computer applications.
1 INTRODUCTION
People involved in strategic thinking, strategic
planning, strategy making and strategy
implementation try to predict, delineate and
influence the future state of their organization. The
work they do deals with the linkage between the
organization’s scenarios, visions, goals and
objectives and the organization’s current external
and internal world. A prerequisite for the success of
their strategy-making activities work is that all the
people involved and also other persons in the
organization arrive at a shared vision as the basis for
development and progress. Often though, the
process of strategic thinking and strategy making is
fraught with misunderstanding and conflict,
especially at the beginning. The participants may
lack a shared understanding of the future path of the
organization; they may not have a common view of
its operating environment or a shared appreciation of
the overlying world structure or underlying
constructs and concepts of their company
characteristics. If, combined with this, management
issues in general and the characteristics of the
organization in particular are cognitively perceived
in different ways by different participants, the
strategy-making process becomes even more
complex and problematic, especially its
implementation. This is true for any organization,
public or private. Faced with the aforementioned
problems, strategy makers continuously express the
need for comprehensive, reliable and commonly
assimilable data, information and knowledge, that
they can use to monitor, diagnose, analyse and
synthesise the current performance of their
organization and to estimate its future potential.
2 THE APPLIED STRUCTURE
We have now worked several years to develop
executive and decision support systems that will
enhance actual decision-making through human
visual perception as well as to meanings in texts as
well as meta-knowledge formation. These new
support systems are based on the ontological reality
of organizational constructs, concepts, variables and
indicators (cf. Kantola et al., 2010). They are also
based on the overall conceptual framework called
the Continuous Strategy (Vanharanta 1995).
The Continuous Strategy ontology is a construct
or framework for strategic planning processes. The
framework is derived from metaphorical insights
into “the Company”, an “organism” seen as part of
the living system. The Continuous Strategy ontology
is supported by a chain of construction metaphors:
the External World, the Business World, the
Company World, the Product World and the Buyer
World. These metaphors represent conceptual
models, and they are used to construct a coherent
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Vanharanta H. and Kantola J..
Strategy Needs Structure - Structure Needs Ontologies – Dynamic Ontologies Carry Meanings.
DOI: 10.5220/0004118902610264
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing (KMIS-2012), pages 261-264
ISBN: 978-989-8565-31-0
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
picture of the real world that exists in and around the
company.
3 EXAMPLES
For With the following examples, we address
collective change and dynamics in a new fashion.
We have created many ontology-based management
and leadership constructs and concepts and applied
those ontologies to Internet-based computer
applications. Several case studies have shown that
we can successfully reach a collective understanding
of current and future situations using these
applications, allowing management to obtain deeper
information from the grass-roots level rapidly (cf.
Ready and Truelove, 2011). This also enables
managers to deepen their knowledge of the current
position of their company, as well as achieving
valuable information concerning its future possible
interests.
3.1 The Folium and Talbot
Applications
Folium and Talbot are applications (Paajanen, 2006)
that are used to help the organization’s management
in the decision-making process when target
development plans are made to improve and support
organizational knowledge creation (c.f. Nonaka’s
SECI process, 1995) and organizational learning
(c.f. Tannenbaum’s model, 1997), on an objective
level. Both areas have a strategic nature. On a
practical level, Folium is used within the
organization to evaluate features that describe
activities, functions and practices concerning
organizational knowledge creation, current and
future. Talbot, in turn, is used to evaluate features
that describe activities, functions and practices
concerning organizational learning, current and
future. Folium and Talbot contain linguistic
indicative statements, which describe the features of
knowledge creation and learning organization in
practice, and respondents are asked to evaluate their
current reality and future vision as they perceive it
according to these statements. As a result of the
evaluation, a proactive vision is visualised, i.e. the
gap between the current reality and future vision.
The reasoning from the indicative statement
evaluation to the visualised proactive vision is made
with fuzzy logic; the statements are semantic entities
and the ontology is the information resident in a
knowledge base (Zadeh, 1973). Figures 1 and 2
show visual sample results from a technology
company. The concepts in the ontology are shown
on the left (in Figure 1 the cut words are: Merging
new knowledge, Spreading new knowledge and
Spending time). On the right, we see graphs showing
how the stakeholders perceived the current reality
and future vision levels of these concepts. The
current reality level is represented by the thinner
blue bars. The level refers to how well this concept
is organized at work. The difference between the
black curvy lines is the proactive vision (c.f.
Creative tension by Senge, 1995) that tells which
concepts and how much should be improved at
work. The length of the horizontal bars shows how
much the stakeholders’ perception about these
concepts deviate, i.e. it shows the asymmetry in their
knowledge and experience. In Figure 2, the Talbot
results show learning asymmetry results in a similar
way as in the knowledge creation example.
3.2 Evidence from the Test Runs
The sample graphs above show quite clearly:
A holistic picture of knowledge creation and
learning, since we can see what the concepts in the
ontology are. This is important in order for
stakeholders (workers, managers, administrators,
funders, etc.) to see what is relevant.
Asymmetry in terms of knowledge creation and
organizational learning. There are multiple
perceptions of knowledge creation and
organizational learning, at least, according to the
work roles, stakeholder roles and individuals.
A bottom-up view of important strategic issues:
current state and proactive future state.
Requirements to management and leadership are
revealed. It would not be possible to guess
something similar than for example Figure 1 and 2
tell to managers and leaders. That is why this is a
great way to provide really easy and useful tools for
strategic management and leadership.
4 CONCLUSIONS
The software industry has attempted to meet the
demand described here for many years. In this
context the executive support and decision support
systems so far developed have provided only partial
solutions. Such systems have supported either
specific activities or specific processes; they have
not provided executives with the kind of support that
would enable them to acquire a collective, holistic
understanding of the issues, concepts and constructs
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Figure 1: Folium results – Knowledge creation asymmetry and creative tension (Evolute database, 2012).
Figure 2: Talbot results – Learning asymmetry and creative tension (Evolute database, 2012).
and also the relations and interrelationships that
must be mastered in strategic management. We
show that by using their employees, businesses can
be more effective and responsive to daily
fluctuations and changes. The change intelligence
capability in the employees’ conscious experience
can be turned to active competence in the workplace.
Our work can help bring the employees closer to the
theoretical side of management and leadership and
thus help their managers and leaders run the
organization more effectively.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We have used the Evolute database, which is run by
Evolute llc, USA. We appreciate that we have had
possibility to use the database.
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