Rapidly changing environments press organizations to respond in an appropriate and timely fashion. Strategic control plays an important role in this adaptation process through its identification and interpretation of "change triggers"--critical events in the external environment that mandate an organization's response. We argue that giving more prominent place to data interpretation in the strategic control process facilitates the identification of factors that trigger change. We build a conceptual model around a three-step process of scanning/monitoring, data interpretation, and response combined with three different levels of strategic control (strategic surveillance, premise monitoring, and implementation control). The model assists managers by highlighting the factors that can cause Type II errors (not changing when change is required) and provides researchers with directions f or future inquiry.

Introduction :Business leaders face an unprecedented level of market turmoil and dynamism. The globalization of markets, the liberalization of the former East-bloc economies, the increasing diversity of the workforce, and the rising ubiquity of the Internet are only a few of the factors driving rapid change. Such changes mandate responses on the part of individual businesses but this begs several questions of managers: do we need to respond, when should we respond, and what should be the nature of our response? While managers have faced similar questions in the past, there is growing agreement that the pace of change has quickened: managers have less time to respond to change.

Change triggers are events in the external environment of such importance and magnitude that they mandate an organization's response (Napster had no choice but to respond to court rulings that it had violated copyright protection). These change triggers play an important role in strategic control. Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997) identified triggering strategic change as a "key unresolved issue" in the academic literature (p. 72), and called for more research into this important area. Strategic changes are adjustments an organization makes to better align itself with its environment, improving the likelihood of successful strategy implementation. One reason triggering change remains unresolved is that the literature cited by these authors has generally not employed frameworks or concepts from research on strategic control. The strategic control literature has more directly addressed this issue of triggering change (Muralidharan, 1997; Picken & Dess, 1997; Preble, 1992). For example, Schreyogg and Steinmann (1987) identified three different ways in which the need for strategic changes can be identified: tracking performance indicators: challenging the validity of crucial assumptions underlying a particular strategy; and identifying emerging issues through macro-environmental scanning.

We assert that the value of strategic control research in addressing the triggering of change can be enhanced by more fully integrating data interpretation into models of strategic control. While Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997) incorporated managerial cognition and data interpretation into their multi-lens framework of strategic change, these concepts have generally been overlooked in strategic control studies (Fiegener, 1994, 1997; and Lorange, et al., 1986 are notable exceptions). Currently, no research has systematically applied cognitive and interpretive concepts to strategic control, nor has it attempted to present strategic control as essentially a data interpretation activity. We, therefore, consider strategic control from an interpretation perspective and then apply this interpretive framework to the issue of the timely triggering of strategic change.

Model of the Strategic Control Process :Strategic control involves the monitoring and evaluation of plans, activities, and results with a view toward future action (Goold & Quinn, 1990; Preble. 1992), providing a "warning bell" through diagnosis of data (Quinn, 1996). The clear intent of strategic control is the triggering of appropriate changes in strategy, be they either tactical adjustments or strategic reorientations (Lorange, et al., 1986; Lorange, 1988). This set of rational procedures strongly reflects what Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997) termed the "rational lens" perspective of strategic change. Our working definition of strategic control, then, is "a set of monitoring procedures that provide information for triggering strategy modification."

One could argue that identifying and interpreting change triggers is equivalent to testing hypotheses: the researcher faces the risk of both Type I and Type II errors (Boyd, Dess & Rasheed, 1993). An effective strategic control system is one that triggers the appropriate response at the appropriate time, avoiding both types of errors. From a strategic control perspective, a Type I error occurs when the situation does not require a tactical or strategic change yet managers misread signals and assume that such change is required. A Type II error occurs when the organization is too inert: managers fail to recognize the need for strategic change in situations where it actually exists. While Type I errors are certainly possible. given the current dynamic business environment, inertia-like Type II errors are the more likely problem.

In statistics, Type II errors can be caused by a variety of factors. The sample size may too small to provide enough information or an adequate level of statistical power. We consider this a "data" issue. In strategic control, small sample size problems correspond to having an inadequate amount of the correct type of data. A given strategic control system may collect and disseminate a large amount of data, but if it is not appropriate data then an organization's decision-makers suffer the equivalent of a small sample size. Alternatively, alpha, the point at which managers reject the null hypothesis that no change is required (thus, triggering change), may be set too low. We consider this a "decision" issue. Various factors both inside and outside of an organization can affect trigger sensitivity, related to the setting of alpha, or the point at which managers decide to reject the null hypothesis and trigger strategic change. We suggest that the structure of scanning and monitoring activities can cause data problems and that an organization's external and internal contexts can cause decision problems. Such unrecognized data shortcomings and unintended sensitivity shifts can increase the risk of Type II errors whereby managers fail to trigger timely and appropriate change.

Model Summary :To trigger either tactical adjustments or strategic reorientations, decision-makers must collect data, make a determination as to its meaning through comparison to preexisting standards or aspirations, and then respond in some way. It is, in other words, inherently a data interpretation process. This interpretation is more than simple analysis of data. It is an elaborate sense-making activity whereby organizational actors try to give meaning to complex, and possibly unordered, data (Daft & Weick, 1984; Weick, 1995). Through formal analysis, managerial judgment, intuition, and social information processing, organizational members make sense of the world around them.

The strategic control model in Figure 1 is based on this interpretive view of triggering strategic change and identifies a variety of factors potentially affecting inertia-like, Type II errors. We present strategic control as an interpretation process having three stages: scanning/monitoring; analysis/interpretation; and response (Daft & Weick, 1984; Weick, 1995). Scanning and/or monitoring of various factors in the external and internal environments is the first of these three. In the next stage, data analysis and interpretation, organizational members imbue data with meaning. Depending on the results of the second stage, the organization takes some kind of action, or responds. In the content dimension of Figure 1, we represent strategic control as comprising three separate activities: strategic surveillance; premise control; and implementation control (Muralidharan, 1997; Preble, 1992; Schreyogg & Steinmann, 1987). This multi-faceted, and multi-level, approach captures the variety of tasks strategic control must involve given today's increasingly demanding business environments. Additionally, these different tasks represent three different ways that strategic change can be triggered, each involving a different focus of attention and process.

Strategic surveillance is broad-based monitoring of the environment whereby the organization interprets, analyzes, and responds to strategic issues (Muralidharan, 1997; Preble, 1992; Schreyogg & Steinmann, 1987). Since the process of strategy planning and implementation normally tends to narrow the scope of awareness to a relatively few number of factors (Miller, 1993), organizations need to broaden their scope of attention. Strategic surveillance helps identify trends and developments emerging from areas not previously identified as important (Preble, 1992). Decision makers package unordered data and stimuli from the environment into coherent and related sets called "issues" that they then can analyze and assess as to their potential impact (Martins & Kambil, 1999; Sharma, 2000).

Premise control, the second strategic control component, concerns the underlying strategic assumptions made in earlier planning efforts regarding internal and external factors (Lampel & Shamsie, 2000; Preble, 1992). During strategy formulation, executives identify critical assumptions underlying their strategy (Lorange, 1988). Once executives identify these assumptions, effective organizations design and implement monitoring systems to ascertain their continued validity. The strength of premise control is its feedforward nature, since it is able to identify potential problems while they are still minor and before they affect an organization's performance (Schreyogg & Steinmann, 1987).

Implementation control, the third strategic control component, requires monitoring strategy implementation performance, usually through milestones, critical success factors, budgets and thresholds, and takes the form of classic feedback control (Preble, 1992; Schreyogg & Steinmann, 1987). Its purpose is to aid managers in making a determination, based on strategy implementation, whether to alter the basic strategic direction. Managers identify important milestones and set strategic thresholds to assist them in knowing when they should consider a change in strategy (Muralidharan, 1997).

Thus, as indicated above, strategic change can be triggered in a number of ways. Concerning strategic surveillance, some environmental changes have sudden and immediate impact. The discovery of mad cow disease in the UK in 2000 depressed beef sales in Europe requiring fast food firms to promote alternative menus of chicken or fish. Other environmental changes like deregulation emerge more slowly and have predictable consequences: increased competition, pricing pressures, and increased innovation to name but a few. Astute managers respond forcefully to such change triggers. When the FCC decreed that telephone companies could transmit video signals over phone lines, many cable companies recognized the clear and immediate threat this created. The response of these firms was to merge or partner with telephone companies to reduce the effects of direct competition. At a more subtle level, slow and incremental changes in an environment can accumulate until they reach or pass a strategic change trigger. This was certainly the case of the fast food industry in the mid-1990s. Food researchers had discovered that as people age, their taste buds begin to die; older consumers required more flavor in order to receive the same positive taste experience they had as youth (Taylor, et al., 2001). McDonald's, recognizing a decline in share as its customer base aged, responded by creating the "Arch Deluxe" and positioning it as the hamburger for adults.

Regarding premise control and change triggers, managers will have identified specific assumptions, the falsehood of which would indicate the need for a strategic change. For example, GM had assumed that its Saturn division could attain a certain level of costs and when it became apparent that it could not, GM's executives altered its "Saturn strategy" (Muralidharan, 1997). Strategic change can also be triggered by the failure to attain certain levels of anticipated performance, and this occurs through the process of implementation control. The lagging far below aspirations of financial performance and market share indicators, for example, will likely generate some form of strategy modification in order to correct the situation. In other cases, firms may recognize that they are in a unique resource position that allows them to undertake dramatic new strategies. Such was the case of AOL, which used its inflated stock price at the end of the millennium to