BUS602: Marketing Management

Long-term strategic analysis (LTSA) is an important decision making process that helps policy/decision makers to develop an effective and efficient long-term strategic view. Thus, LTSA is crucial to help for decision-making under conditions of high uncertainty and complexity. Environmental scanning plays a fundamental role in long-term strategic planning. In addition, it is used to identify all drivers by discovering the current internal strength and weakness, external drivers, and future external opportunities and threats of a specific domain. 

A PESTEL analysis is a widely used environmental analysis tool. PESTEL stands for Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Legal, and Ethical issues. Its analysis examines the impact of each of these factors on a specific domain. In addition, SWOT analysis is an important strategic planning tool used to evaluate the internal Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and External Threats involved in a specific domain. A SWOT analysis cooperates with the results of the PESTEL analysis. 

For knowledge elicitation process from the domain experts, Real-Time (RT-Delphi) Delphi technique is widely-used as a structured and controlled debate. In RT-Delphi, all opinions are made anonymous and the domain experts move toward consensus. It has the following 5 advantages (in comparison to traditional Delphi): Round-less approach then significantly saves time and cost, experts have instantaneous access to the website, flexibility in the number of participants and it can be easily applied to problems formulated in a matrix design. 

The process of knowledge acquisition requires an agreement on the concepts and their attributes of a specific domain. Ontology describes domain concepts and their attributes and all relationships that hold between these concepts. It is crucial in order to harmonize the meaning of concepts and provide richer relationships between them. This paves the way towards the knowledge acquisition process by minimizing the chances of misunderstandings when debating a certain concept or a problem. It provides for reducing the contradiction of the experts' judgments by defining a common language between domain experts and avoiding misunderstandings when talking about specific topics. The explanation facilities for the knowledge-based model indeed influence policy/decision maker confidence in accepting the consensus results. 

Moreover, MICMAC (Impact Matrix Cross-Reference Multiplication Applied to a Classification) represents a structural analysis based on comparing the hierarchy of issues in the different classifications (direct, indirect, and potential), which is a rich source of information to determine the major wildcards of a specific domain. Finally, most classical environmental scanning models in literature provide only the short and medium term. 

The paper structure is organized as follows: in Section 2, we discuss the problem addressed. Then in Section 3, our proposed solution is explained in detail, including the inputs, output, and the approach itself. Also, in Section 4, we give a case study. Finally in Section 6, we conclude and suggest possible future work.