問26
頻出度★★★
企業の経営戦略策定に使用される SWOT 分析において, 外部環境分析の観点はどれか。
平成21年度 春期 ITパスポート試験 問26
ストラテジ系経営戦略マネジメント › 経営戦略手法
This question's explanation and your answers so far.
解説
問 26
- ア
正解 The correct answer is ア. SWOT analysis is a method for organizing the situation a company is in when it formulates a management strategy, and its name comes from the initials of Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat. These four are divided along two axes: whether something belongs to the internal or the external environment, and whether it is a positive or a negative factor. Strengths and weaknesses are internal-environment perspectives covering what the company itself has and can change through its own efforts, such as management resources, technical capability, human resources, brand, and cost structure. Opportunities and threats, by contrast, are external-environment perspectives covering what happens outside the company and cannot be controlled by it, such as growth or shrinkage of the market, changes in customer needs, competitors’ moves, revisions of laws and regulations, technological innovation, and economic trends; among these, the ones that work in the company’s favor are opportunities and the ones that work against it are threats. The perspective of external environment analysis is therefore “opportunities and threats”, so ア is the correct answer. In practice these four elements are combined to derive strategies such as “use strengths to seize opportunities” or “how to cover weaknesses against threats” (cross-SWOT analysis), so not mixing up which elements are internal and which are external is the starting point.
Incorrectイ
Resources and technologies refer to the management resources a company holds (people, goods, money, information) and its own technical capability, and they belong to the internal environment. In SWOT analysis these are internal elements evaluated as strengths (if the company is superior) or weaknesses (if it is inferior), not perspectives of external environment analysis. In addition, the label “resources and technologies” itself does not correspond to any of the four SWOT perspectives.
Incorrectウ
Markets and customers are certainly outside the company, but they are the “objects” of analysis, not the names of the perspectives that SWOT analysis uses. In SWOT, expansion of a market or the appearance of a new customer segment is judged as an opportunity, and shrinkage of a market or loss of customers as a threat; that is, they are evaluated by applying the opportunity and threat perspectives. Taking markets, customers, and competitors as the starting points is 3C analysis (Customer, Competitor, Company), which is different from the perspective of SWOT external environment analysis that the question asks about.
Incorrectエ
Strengths and weaknesses are indeed perspectives of SWOT analysis, but they are perspectives of internal environment analysis. Elements that the company holds and can improve by itself, such as technical capability, brand power, production capacity, and financial health, are compared with competitors, and the points where it is superior are organized as strengths and the points where it is inferior as weaknesses. As an answer to a question that asks for the perspective of external environment analysis, it has the internal and the external the wrong way round.
ここがポイント
- The four perspectives of SWOT analysis are: internal environment = strengths (Strength) and weaknesses (Weakness); external environment = opportunities (Opportunity) and threats (Threat). Separate them by whether the company can control them: what the company can control is internal, and what it cannot control, such as markets, competitors, laws and regulations, and technological innovation, is external.
- Crossing the internal/external axis with the positive/negative axis lets you organize them as: strength = internal positive, weakness = internal negative, opportunity = external positive, threat = external negative. Telling it apart from similar strategic analysis methods also matters: the method that takes markets, customers, and competitors as its starting points is 3C analysis, and the method that looks at the competitive structure of an industry is Five Forces analysis.
用語