Organisations analyse and strategies - Essay Example

m of politics based on “adaptive planning” to regulate the rapid and uneven change characterizing the current situation, which embodies an acceptance of pluralism and the surrender of power. (Hammond, 2003, p. 59) Now, what Hammond means here are two aspects of the same situation. By ‘acceptance of pluralism’ he means choice of multiple solutions and whenever there is more than one solution in any organisation, manager has to select one thereby rejecting the rest of them. This creates ‘conflicting situations’ which Hammond has referred to as ‘surrender of power’.

This tension between the recognized need for pluralism and the desire for influence or control is absolutely critical to a consideration of the impact of systems thinking, and forms the basis for ‘soft’ approaches within the field. Soft Systems Approach is mostly used in information systems as an instantiation of information technology, where the same information technology can be instantiated in different ways. SSA usage is also highlighted in Management Information Systems, therefore, is that it involves not just information technology, but also its instantiation.

There are the rich organisational and political processes whereby a given set of information technology is instantiated and there are the rich organisational and political processes pertaining to the continual managing, maintaining, and changing of the information technology so as to sustain the instantiation. In the same spirit, socio-technical systems theory also make use of SSA thereby making the claim that separate efforts to optimise the technical system alone and the social system alone will not only lead to a global suboptimum, but can even be unfeasible in the first place.

Equally, the same information system can be a success in one organisation but a failure in another, while the same organisation can experience success with one information system but failure with another. Hence, on one hand SSA creates