Critically evaluation of Porter's five forces, Value Chain Analysis, Balanced ScoredCard

Essay by elitebluesUniversity, Master'sA-, February 2004

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Given the demands of today's competitive and dynamic environment, it is quite challenging to understand strategic issues facing organizations and develop the capability for long term organizational success. This report aims to present a critically analysis of three frameworks across organizations: Porter's Five Forces, Value Chain and Balanced Scorecard. Such critical evaluation includes identifying the benefits and limitations of three frameworks and considering some implementation issues within organizations.

As powerful strategic management tools, Porter's Five Forces, Value Chain and Balanced Scorecard frameworks are linked and interacted each other in a wide circle of business in context. Porter's Five Forces and Value Chain both help strategic managers to make decision on the basis of organizational external environment and internal analysis. The two frameworks are especially valuable for managers to develop and implement long-term strategy for organizations so as to build and maintain competitive advantages in the long run. And Balanced Scorecard can ensure and monitor the executions of strategy made by managers in a set of well-structured measures.

However, beyond the linkage between them, these three respective frameworks do have its own particular emphasis which is applied in different directions among organizations. Porter's Five Forces mainly focuses on the industry structure analysis in the organizations external environment. It reveals the source of competition in an industry and external influence including the threats and opportunities of the industry that organization has to face to obtain competitive advantage. Value Chain highlights the explorations of internal analysis of a chain of business activities. It explores the role and contribution of organization's resources corresponding to primary and support activities in a cost-effective way to gain cost advantage. As for the Balanced Scorecard, it emphasizes the evaluation of organizational overall performance by integrating financial measures with other key performance indicators. And measuring overall performance...