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

e-business strategies in the virtual organization
roles. Increasingly, we are seeing the large traditional organization
breaking up and the emergence of new, networked
organizational forms in which work is conducted by temporary
teams that cross organizational lines.
In this new climate, organizations have to learn new approaches
to managing a workforce of knowledge workers, yet little
information is available on how to implement this successfully
and how to ensure more effective personnel performance as a
result. Drucker (1998) suggests that the traditional role of
managers telling workers what to do is no longer viable and
instead managers must direct people as if they were unpaid
volunteers, tied to the organization by commitment to its aims
and purposes and often expecting to participate in its governance.
As information technologies continue to permeate all
aspects of organizational life the role of the IT professional will
also change and they will have to embrace a set of shared
values and assumptions about how things work in the
organization.
Markus et al. 2000 suggest that organizations will have to seek to
harness the talents and energies of dispersed ‘communities of
practice’ and increasingly will face a workforce of volunteers as
more people choose periods of less than full-time work. This
obviously raises the question of how traditional management
tasks of motivating and directing employees will have to change
in the face of these new realities.
This chapter considers three important issues. First, we look at
B2B interactions along the value chain. Second we look at the
B2C interactions, taking the increasingly important area of
customer relationship marketing (CRM – shown as customer
interactions in Figure 10.1) as our focus. Lastly we look at
Business to Employee (B2E) relationships within the context of
ERP. In particular we look at the motivational factors influencing
employees to initiate change in the face of these new realities
and the implications for management of both IT and non-IT
employees in the learning organization.
10.2 e-business and ERP
As reviewed in Chapter 7, a useful model for understanding the
adoption of e-business strategies for the learning organization
considers the organization as operating along three vectors –
customer/market interaction, asset sourcing and knowledge
leverage supported by a strong information technology
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