Strategic Planning in Education

BCAA is an outstanding school that was rated as one of the top schools in the UAE in 2016 and again in 2018. Taking into consideration the fact that strategic planning is an important factor in guiding educational organizations to achieve a shared vision, this case study provides its readers with a detailed guide for other schools to be aided with. This case study shows the commitment of the leadership team towards the strategic planning. It also highlights the importance and the different aspects of the planning. The researcher has interviewed the members of the leadership team in order to collect the required data for the study. The researcher analyzed the collected data thematically to provide other schools with a successful effective model of strategic planning. The findings of this study show that having a well-studied strategic plan in BCAA led it to succeed and to be evaluated as an outstanding college in all aspects. The results also reveal that the success of the BCAA strategic planning is due to the commitment, cooperation, effective communication, and sincerity of the people working at it.

Strategic Information Systems in Arab Organizations

Organizations are increasingly dependent on information systems, and they invest dearly on systems to integrate disparate business functions, automate business processes, and support operations in order to sustain business and survive in a competition-intensive business environment. However, such systems have in many occasions failed fully or partially. The lack of “fit-to purpose” seems to be the common factor among most of the failed cases. This suggests that such systems are not selected, implemented, configured, or supported based on a proper analysis and understanding of the organization structure and hierarchy, business functions, business processes, and business environment. Evidently, the majority of organizations tend to emphasize system specifications that match their operational and tactical requirements, with little attention given to strategic requirements, culminating in issues with strategic planning and decision making. This chapter uses a survey and simple model based on the characteristics and competitiveness indicators of strategic information systems (SIS) to examine the impact of such systems on the business performance in 16 medium to large Arab organizations. The study concludes with an emphasis of the importance of SIS to help organizations achieve excellence and competitive advantage and realize business objectives and goals.

Strategic Practices and Crisis Management

Important as it is, crisis has become the hallmark of the present era, making it necessary to confront, contain, and reduce its negative effects. As a science, crisis management is associated with responding to crises, and as an art, it is about making decisions under exceptional pressure in the absence of information. It also needs to follow methodical practices such as strategic thinking, strategic planning, and strategic management to ensure effectiveness. This chapter provides an overview of crisis management as a discipline, highlighting important aspects, such as the definition of crisis and related terms (accident, conflict, danger, and disaster), concepts, causes, and characteristics, and distinguishing between crisis management and management crisis in practice. The study also outlines a typical crisis life cycle and its phases (shock phase, regression phase, recognition phase, and adaptation phase). The research then moves to identifying crisis management strategies, defining preventive strategy technique, emphasizing the importance of effective strategic practices in crisis management, and minimizing their impact. The research concludes by proposing a model to increase the effectiveness of crisis management through effective strategic practices at the state level.

The Healthcare Strategic Practice in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

This chapter aims to review the healthcare strategies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a special focus on the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The chapter starts with an introduction to the adopted strategic planning of health sector in the UAE. Then it provides the theoretical background to the subject, outlines the persisting health issues and concerns, in addition to the main challenges of health planning in the United Arab Emirates. This will be followed by an overview of the current health system and regulations in the UAE, and will elaborate on the adopted health strategies, and upon that will suggest solutions and tips that can help in overcoming challenges and resolving critical issues. The review concludes with recommendation for future researches that could expand the scope of this review to be more comprehensive and focused on the strategic option for achieving excellence in the healthcare sector.

Strategic Human Resources Management

The chapter aims to identify the level of human resources management strategies in the Arab business organizations in Iraq and Jordan as a model in an attempt to bridge the shortage of descriptive and comparative Arabic studies. In order to achieve the goal of this chapter, it is structured to cover the following sections: 1) introduction and intellectual background to subject, 2) literature review, 3) the human and organizational characteristics of the Arab business organizations in Iraq and Jordan, and 4) The reality of human resource management strategies in the Arab organizations in Iraq and Jordan and their future directions.

Entrepreneurship Strategies in the Arab World

The aim of this chapter is to explore the concept and practical implications of entrepreneurship and its importance in developing new projects, and to encourage Arab youth self-reliance by using entrepreneurship as a tool for creating value and developing successful and unique ideas. This leads to a discussion of entrepreneurship strategies in business, highlighting that the success of any new entrepreneurial projects depends on having appropriate opportunity, sufficient resources, and dedicated leader. Once these factors are in place, the entrepreneurial project must adopt an appropriate strategy, new entry, imitating, or adaptive strategy. The chapter is divided into four parts. The first presents the concepts of leadership and pioneering projects and their importance in community development. The second deals with the analysis of a pilot project. The third deals with analyzing, discussing, evaluating, and criticizing entrepreneurship strategies. And the fourth presents a summary of the subject and a set of recommendations. The chapter is concludes with recommendations and suggests solutions to ensure effectiveness of the adopted entrepreneurship strategy.

Jordan's Media Strategy and Its Role in Combating Terrorism

There is no doubt that media plays a key role in modern societies, as it has become the main source for the formation of collective awareness among citizens around the world. In light of the real vile war the Arab world has been witnessing against terrorism, media has become a major player in the confrontation. Today, the Arab world is facing terrorist and fanatic attacks that take religion as a cover for its atrocities and hideous actions, disturbing the peace and amity in communities, and causing a lot of harm to innocent people, destruction of infrastructure, and devastating impact on economy and the social structure. Unfortunately, Jordan's media—as is the case with other Arab media—seems to have issues with their adopted strategies to deal with terrorism, its causes, and influencing factors. The chapter provides the details and findings of a study that attempts to characterize the approach adopted by Jordan's media coverage of terrorism and to investigate and appraise the strategic value of such approach, leading to the recommendation for a more effective strategy that is based on proper understanding of the political, social, and economic environment and other key factors.

Strategic Planning in Higher Education in the Arab World

This chapter aims to deliberate the strategic planning in higher education as a critical factor in the success of transforming the quality of higher education in the Arab world. With Arab universities still lagging behind in the world's top 200 universities, according to both Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE) world university rankings for the year 2018, it is momentous to investigate the causes and tackle the issues prompting Arab universities to not fulfill their role as hubs that transform nations. The chapter starts off by reviewing the status quo of higher education in the Arab world and Arab nations' aspirations for the higher education sector; it then proceeds to review research on the critical role of strategic planning in the higher education sector around the world and the obstacles hindering its effective implementation. The chapter then addresses the gap between the current strategic planning practices in higher education institutions in the Arab world and the effective practices that should be adopted to overcome the challenges confronting this sector.

A Strategic Approach for Patient-Centric E-Healthcare Development

Different types of industries, strategic thinking, planning, and management in healthcare have become cornerstones of providing high quality of healthcare services among the rapidly changing competitive environment and the emerging technologies, which is pushing health service providers to adopt the eHealth solutions to automate the treatment workflows during health service. This chapter introduces a new healthcare IT cloud model called HealthGate Cloud (HGC), which is specially designed as a central repository for patients' EHRs. The proposed model provides a technical and business framework for a centralized enterprise healthcare information system and data sharing between all participated healthcare providers in the country or region, which makes them all as if they are one big hospital having one single repository and database for all patients' medical records. It can be used by any HA in any country or region to provide this solution for HSPs through subscriptions business model.

The Impact of Board Composition on Corporate Strategy in the Arab Region Context

The board of directors plays an essential role in ensuring good corporate governance in any companies or institutes regardless of the size or nature of work. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the impact of board composition on corporate strategy and its contribution to strategic decisions and management monitoring and control of the corporate strategy in Arab organization by examining a case from Jordan. The study adopted analytical descriptive (quantitative) approach; a questionnaire was used for data gathering, and SPSS software was used for data analysis. The questionnaires were distributed randomly to workers in selected companies and banks that are registered in Amman Stock Market, and around 100 responses of members of board of directors (BOD) and other workers were collected and analyzed. The results confirmed the impact of the board on its contribution to the decision process, on the monitoring and controlling strategy, and on its contribution to advising management in Amman Stock Market. The study revealed that the board is primarily responsible for overseeing board performance and achieving a proper return for shareholders, while preventing conflicts of interest and balancing competing demands on the company. The study recommended the need for implementation plans and instructions in order to identify deviations.