With the massive pervasiveness of information technology in society and business today, it should not be surprising that we routinely run into examples of good and bad "strategic alignment" --- or perhaps I should say "Examples of alignment and non-alignment." The following tale will be recognized by New Yorkers.
The great and venerable cultural institution Metropolitan Opera has, after appointing a new general manager prior to last season, been undergoing some significant transformation aimed at expanding their following and audience base. The opera announced a free, public open house to be held the week prior to opening night in September, to include attendance at a full dress rehearsal of the opening night production. There one was one hook: you needed tickets --- an obvious requirement for crowd control! It is easily predictable that when a "free" event of this quality is announced, the volume of response will beggar description. However, this does not appear to have been so predictable to the Met Opera management. Tickets would be available (free, remember!) via phone or web only, beginning at 10:00 AM the third day prior to the event. And of course, by about 20 seconds after 10:00 both the reservation phone number and the Met web site were totally brought to their knees and had become non-functional. I understand they had 4000 people in the queue although I have no idea how they were able to count them (Incidentally. the opera house seats about 3900).
The point of this tale is it shows a monstrous lack of "Strategic fit," i.e., a complete imbalance between strategy and structure. The Met's management is admirably focused on growing the scope of the business (specifically, broadening the customer set) but has a telecommunications and IT infrastructure totally unable to respond to the initiative they designed in this case. Of course, "what to do about that" is an interesting problem. Can --- or should -- any organization invest in enough infrastructure capacity to handle a once-a-year huge peak? Such an investment is clearly impossible for most businesses to justify (Notice, I said "most" because exceptions do exist). The alternative is to maintain strategic fit by keeping your strategic initiatives in line with either your existing infrastructure capabilities, or your capacity to invest.
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