ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the strategic planning process within institutional internationalization. Strategic planning aligns an organization with its surrounding environment and is an effective way to promote organizational change and improvement. Senior international officers (SIOs) have found strategic planning very useful in their work. New SIOs can use strategic planning as a way to build cohesion and capacity within their unit and to define useful first steps. Experienced SIOs can use strategic planning to work effectively with other units on their campus to advance internationalization. Although strategic planning takes several different forms, they all generally involve the following fairly simple set of steps: an environmental scan of the context within which the organization is operating; from this, the identification of one or more strategic issues to be addressed; and a concrete plan for doing something about these issues. An environmental scan will look both internally, at the organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and externally, at threats and opportunities present outside the organization.
