Designing Strategy with SWOT Matrix Method: Case Study of Farapeyvand Company

In today's world that wonderful changes and developments perpetually occur in various areas, especially in information technology, the environment has undergone extreme instability and competitions have become very intensive. Therefore, to be successful in competitions, organizations should be futuristic and use environment-oriented planning in a way that they would be able to identify environmental changes and factors, and analyze their impacts on the organization as well as how the organization should interact with them in a long-term horizon. This type of planning is in fact strategic planning in which the environment's opportunities and threats as well as intra-organizational strengths and weaknesses are identified through examining the environments within and outside the organization while keeping in mind the missions of the organization, long-run goals are defined for the organization; in order to hit these goals, it chooses a strategy from among strategic options that emphasizing the strengths and undermining weaknesses, seizes the opportunities optimally and avoids threats in a way to lead to organizational success in competition (Aghazadeh, 2004). As information technology (IT) is now considered as an opportunity and threat in organizations, the corporations that work in the filed of information technology especially producing software, can take advantage of the strategic planning. Hence, considering the need for strategic planning vis-à-vis the new environment, this paper tries to implement the strategy with the SWOT method for this company. To achieve this goal, information was collected about the opportunities and threats as well as the strengths and weaknesses of company through questionnaires and interviews with company founders and the following results were reached: The primary advisable strategy for the company is that it should invest on “products and services innovation strategy”. Beside the company may put “market expansion strategy”, i.e. in Iran and later in the world, on the agenda.