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

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e-Business Strategies <strong>for</strong> Virtual Organizations<br />

More recently, leading firms that have begun to undertake<br />

e-<strong>business</strong> to meet strategic goals recognize that they only<br />

accomplish their objectives through people, there<strong>for</strong>e placing<br />

importance on improving the quality of work-life issues. If<br />

effectively managed, employees should ultimately be more<br />

productive in their work tasks and better able to serve<br />

customers, suppliers, and <strong>business</strong> partners. The key constructs<br />

that can be probed here are: gaps between effectiveness<br />

expectations (goals) and actual per<strong>for</strong>mance improvements, e.g.<br />

employee work satisfaction, efficient resourcing, and customer<br />

interaction (Venkatraman and Henderson 1998).<br />

� Outcomes – it was found that where success was achieved, the<br />

project showed an improvement in one of the outcome<br />

constructs – the quality of work life from the outset thus<br />

motivating employees to support additional change<br />

processes.<br />

� Per<strong>for</strong>mance gains – the per<strong>for</strong>mance gains were typically<br />

achieved from two sources; labour cost savings and greater<br />

operational efficiency through optimized resource allocation,<br />

and more effective decision making through access to more<br />

reliable real-time data frequently via mobile technology.<br />

The intrinsic motivation and self-management of autonomous<br />

knowledge within the development teams played an important<br />

role in the successful implementation. The emphasis was very<br />

much more on collective per<strong>for</strong>mance rather than individual but<br />

at the same time development and maintenance of personal and<br />

professional reputations was a significant driver.<br />

10.9 Successful management of change<br />

222<br />

The findings from our study found that a successful project had<br />

facilitators in all components of the <strong>business</strong> framework shown<br />

in Figure 10.2, including the change environment and project<br />

management. It was also found that the least successful<br />

e-<strong>business</strong> projects had inhibitors in several dimensions, especially<br />

in the area of cultural readiness and change management.<br />

This highlights the need to encourage the balancing of conflicting<br />

organizational knowledge, when contemplating the adoption<br />

of e-<strong>business</strong> solutions.<br />

In the future, as e-<strong>business</strong> activities become commonplace,<br />

corporate portals <strong>for</strong> empowering employees will be considered<br />

as an economic necessity. The next wave of economic advantage<br />

lies in revenue generation from new <strong>business</strong> opportunities in

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