**3.2 Political environment**

Politically there are many facets that one has to consider while providing technology services to the stakeholders in that country. Some example here:


Besides such external factors there are internal factors that influence technology strategy. A multinational organization operating in five continents generally has the manufacturing plants in low cost countries, the Research and Development in high talent rich locations and the back office work in most optimum cities. The resultant countries have a sort of unwritten hierarchy in the multinational organization. The heads of those countries have ears to the higher ups in the company and they have a say about every possible strategic and tactical plan of the company. Strategy formulation that happens in such a multi-country, multi-product, multidivision matrix organization can be best described in Lindblom's [16] terminology as 'Partisan Mutual Adjustment'. The strategist needs to manage certain give and take while making final plan. The various groups in a multinational company working in affiliates and parent company have own interests. The strategist needs to balance these interests, the process is referred as partisan mutual adjustment, typically found in the political circles.

One may also witness an intervention termed as collibration by Dunshire [17]. Collibration is the term used by Dunshire to indicate a higher level intervention such as a directive to award a contract to a certain vendor, or to appoint to particular person in a particular position. Philips deal with Dell on outsourcing of global desktop services that was canceled in 12 months in 2006, later on awarded to IBM. Dell was also supplier of components to Philips. One may wonder if the desktop deal with Dell was part of condition to maintain customer-supplier relationship.

Thirdly there has been a concept of coalition that is usually seen in political circles. A strategist in a multinational company needs to aware and work with coalition actors as described by Sabatier [18]. The coalition politics, also referred s 'Realpolitik' is a term that represents groups of people joining hands in a given context without any regard to their own ideology or own goals. It is also called as pragmatic politics. In a multinational company one may find such coalitions that exit only for a transient period to serve certain common goals.
