[8] 2002 e-business-strategies-for-virtual-organizations

e-Business Strategies for Virtual Organizations
transactions. Specifically, it has the capacity to lower the
marginal costs of electronic business processes, reduce the
criticality of many intermediaries and enable the efficient
handling of large volumes of transactions leading to superior
cost/performance for the business. However, these functionalities
are not equally available to all businesses across all
industries. The extent of disintermediation (i.e. the process of
removing the role of middlemen) will depend on product and
service characteristics. Information intensive businesses, especially
the services sector, may witness a reduction in layers of
intermediaries as compared with those in the manufacturing
industries. There is also increasing recognition of the emergence
of new forms of intermediaries which seek to exploit the
emerging niches in the electronic marketspace. Thus it is critical
for the global-orientated SME to articulate its current and future
business directions and to analyse how these relate to developments
in the electronic marketspace. This will allow it to choose
the appropriate business model, infrastructure configuration
and an effective management strategy.
In the next section we present a broad framework for managing
an Internet-based information infrastructure that facilitates the
achievement of extended market access and competitive performance
of a global-orientated SME. A number of case
examples will demonstrate how this online infrastructure can
facilitate the extension of the scope of operations of the SME,
especially in:
� managing core organizational activities which may now be
dispersed over multiple geographical sites;
� mediation of the cooperative efforts between business partners
and other stakeholders;
� management of the client community;
� development of a consistent global image of business and
products.
The cases also reveal that to be successful, an online enterprise
needs a strategy that aligns its business logic/model with its
infrastructure configuration on a continuous basis.
6.3 Strategic framework for managing a global
SME business
114
Figure 6.1 describes the broad framework for managing a global
e-business strategy within an SME context. Readers will note
that this builds upon the conceptual framework introduced in