If you’re typical of management, you’re probably thinking you already understand basic strategy.  You pick a market, define your customer, and develop methods to reach your customer.  Simple, right?

But Is Management Strategy That Simple?

No, it isn’t, and here’s why.  

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It probably seems to you like every time you want to talk about compliance, everyone runs away and hides, they ignore you and hope you go away, or they fuss and moan. Compliance is a fact of business life, however. Your company must comply with:

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ST. LOUIS, MO, December 17, 2010 — Bizmanualz, Inc., a St. Louis-based Software as a Service (SaaS) provider for the document compliance marketplace, announces that President Chris Anderson has been recognized by ASQ – the world’s largest network of quality resources and experts – with three service awards for his leadership and distinguished service to ASQ.

Anderson was presented with the Kaufman Award for his years of outstanding and meritorious service to the St. Louis Section. Lester S. Kauffman was the innovative founder, organizer, and first President of the ASQ St. Louis Section. To commemorate his memory, the St. Louis Section designated a plaque in 1952 to be awarded each year to the person who had performed outstanding and meritorious service to the Section.

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The integration of technology into your workplace requires that you hire and maintain a highly-skilled, well-trained workforce.  Employees must be hired to fill immediate openings and training must be budgeted and completed to keep employees current with the growth requirements you’ve identified in your business plan.

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Human resource management is performed in parallel with short- and long-term strategic plans.  This requires you to tie together your strategic management planning with your business process development in order to lead to successful people management in line with your business plans.

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Most of us believe our companies have adequate “web presence”, considering the time and money we spend. We have a web site (Figure 1) — maybe it’s not on a level with the big consumer companies, but it tells visitors all they need to know about our company and our products/services, and it’s user-friendly.

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Human Resources is a dynamic subject.  Federal, state, and local labor-related laws and their interpretation are continually under review.  Generally, the review process for labor laws is through the courts, which have the jurisdiction to hear and decide on these cases.

Additionally, the very nature of a business itself, relative to its size and mission, will dictate the level of Human Resource Management and the structure and application of HR Policies & Procedures.

One thing every business has in common?

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Prior to the 1960′s, we used manual systems — entirely paper-based, like ordering, purchasing, sales, and production — to run the business. Then the information age hit and technology was introduced to automate the information flow or paper shuffle (remember the dream of the “paperless office”?). Productivity increased, jobs descriptions changed, and the new technology was accepted.

Now that computer systems are ubiquitous, everyone wants access to the information they contain. People want new business reports describing new relationships, and the IT department has responded by developing more software applications for more users. Historically, the corporate IT department has reacted to demand but in today’s hypercompetitive environment, that’s not enough. IT has to anticipate!

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How many times has someone asked you to do something like “Draw up a plan for ‘X’” that you complete, only to have them say, “That’s not what I wanted!” or “That’s not how you do it!”  You might be thinking, “You didn’t tell me exactly how you wanted it done.”

If you find yourself saying “That’s not right” to your employees after the job is supposed to be complete, you have a communication problem — one that’s resulting in general inefficiency, as well as bad feelings and low morale.  Perhaps it’s time you thought about creating a Policies and Procedures Manual.

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In the first part of this article, we discussed Workplace Change and the Speed of Information. In part two, we complete our discussion with a look at information technology’s effect on Social Systems, Skills Displacement, and the Dynamics of Information Technology.

Social Systems

Questions in the information age have been surfacing, causing rifts in the social system of the organization. Changes in thought are occurring as part of the cultural transformation. Work groups are forming as workers move away from linear processing (assembly lines) and toward other models and dynamics, yet we are glued to the computer more. Social interaction as our parents and grandparents knew it is on the decline. Organizations will be forced to adopt changes in order to survive in the fast-paced information age.

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