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WhaT are The dIFFerenCes beTWeen operaTIonal and sTraTegIC monITorIng and ConTrol? 343
some managers are charged with protecting vulnerable members of society, others with
ensuring that public money is not wasted, and yet others may be required to protect
the independence of professional staff. At other times objectives are ambiguous because
the strategy has to cope with unpredictable changes in the environment, making the
original objectives redundant.
A further assumption in the simplified control model is that there is some reason-
able knowledge of how to bring about the desired outcome. That is, when a decision is
made one can predict its effects with a reasonable degree of confidence. In other words,
operational control assumes that any interventions that are intended to bring a process
back under control will indeed have the intended effect. Yet, this implies that the rela-
tionships between the intervention and the resulting consequence within the process
are predictable, which in turn assumes that the degree of process knowledge is high
(see Chapter 7). However, at the strategic level this is rarely totally true. For example,
if an organisation decides to relocate in order to be more convenient for its customers,
it may or may not prove to be correct. Customers may react in a manner that was not
predicted. Even if customers seem initially to respond well to the new location, there
may be a lag before negative reactions become evident. In fact, many strategic deci-
sions are taken about activities about which the cause–effect relationship is only partly
understood. There is a degree of uncertainty in most strategic decisions, which cannot
be entirely eliminated.
A further difference between operational and strategic control is the frequency
with which control interventions are made. Operational control interventions are
often repetitive and occur frequently (e.g., checking on progress hourly, daily or even
weekly). This means that the organisation has the opportunity to learn how its inter-
ventions affect the implementation process, which considerably facilitates control. By
contrast, strategic control can be non-repetitive, with each implementation task involv-
ing unique projects or investments. So, because the intervention, or the deviation from
plan that caused it, may not be repeated exactly, there is little learning.
How do these differences between operational and strategic control impact on the
1
process of operations strategy? Professor Geert Hofstede, an academic better known
for his work on the international characteristics of strategic decision making, has incor-
porated these, and other, differences into a typology of control, a modified version
of which is shown in Figure 10.3. Hofstede’s typology identifies a number of types of
control that are a function of the differences between operational and strategic control,
discussed above.
Operational control, he concludes, is relatively straightforward: objectives are unam-
biguous, the effects of interventions are known and activities are repetitive. This type of
control can be codified using predetermined conventions and rules. There are, however,
still some challenges to successful routine control. It needs operational discipline to
make sure that control procedures are systematically implemented. The main point,
though, is that any divergence from the conditions necessary for routine control
implies a different type of control.

Expert control
If objectives are unambiguous, yet the effects of interventions relatively well under-
stood, but the activity is not repetitive (e.g., installing a ‘new-to-the-company’ piece of
technology, such as an ERP system), control can be delegated to an ‘expert’ – someone
for whom such activities are repetitive because they have built their knowledge on
previous experience elsewhere. Making a success of expert control requires that such

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