SWOT Analysis
In order to stay effective and successful in the marketplace, every organization has to be aware of internal and external forces which could impact their success or failure (Lee & Walsh, 2011). SWOT analysis is a commonly used tool for analyzing organization’s internal and external environment in order to attain a systematic approach and support for decision situation (Kangas et al., 2003; Kurttila, Pesonen, Kangas & Kajanus, 2000; Sorensen, Vidal & Engstrom, 2004). It provides a convenient and promising way of conducting a situational assessment and allows a focus group to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in adopting a particular strategy.
In general, SWOT is a list of statements with description of the present and future trend of internal and external environment. The expressions of individual factors are general and brief which describes subjective views. SWOT analysis is applied over a wide range of application areas, including agriculture (Wah & Merican, 2009), environment (Lozano & Valles, 2007), healthcare (Cicea, Busu & Armeanu, 2011), marketing (Novicevic, Harvey, Autry & Bond, 2004) and general management (Jackson, Joshi & Erhardt, 2003); a detailed review may also be found in (Ghazinoory, Abdi & Azadegan-Mehr, 2011). The literature review of conventional SWOT analysis reveals that the importance of criteria (factors) is not quantified to provide the effect of each criterion on the proposed strategy (Chang & Huang, 2006; Masozera, Alavalapati, Jacobson & Shrestha, 2006) and therefore needs to be utilized with other multicriteria decision making techniques. There has appeared integration of SWOT with other scientific techniques especially multicriteria decision-making and quantifying techniques (Kurttila et al., 2000; Yuksel & Dagdeviren, 2007; Hatami-Marbini & Saati, 2009; Tavana & Yousefpoor, 2012; Ebonzo & Liu, 2013) to make it more operational.