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

10.10 Summary
e-business strategies in the virtual organization
other business-to-business models, such as business-to-consumer
for customer satisfaction. These are complex problems
that can never be solved with technology alone. They require
leadership, appropriate problem solving skills, lots of hard work
and executive commitment, and a culture that embraces the
ideals of the learning organization (a team and community
orientated work process). The organizational design, learning
environment, and human-to-human communication and collaboration
must be aligned to the enabling technology. One should
always keep in mind the balance between people, business
processes, and technology. In a labour force of cross-functional
virtual teams management will be more about motivation and
governance may be largely a question of self-regulation rather
than traditional managerial control. IT professionals may well
be better equipped for this change given the large ‘community
of practice’ with a strong, shared culture of technical professionalism
and their extended use of technology for communication
and decision making.
We began this chapter by inviting you to consider how ERP
systems, introduced in Chapter 7, and e-business tools complement
and integrate with each other.
We went on to introduce a model of organizational activity
which displays three vectors along which e-business tools are
introduced to meet business ends, and in the process, adding
degrees of virtuality to an existing company.
Along the vector of asset sourcing and relationships with other
firms, we considered emerging trends in customer relationship
management as they apply both in B2C and B2B activities. We
went on to spend rather more time on the implications of being
within B2B online trading groups, and extending our view of
customer relationships into this area. We came back full circle by
considering how both B2C and B2B e-business operations can
integrate the emerging Internet technologies within a modern
call centre for customer and business partner satisfaction.
The third vector is the complex area of knowledge management
as a corporate resource, and this topic has been introduced here as
the third vector of our organizational activity model. We have
looked in particular at the role and practice of change management
with companies undergoing the adoption of e-business
strategies, although this topic in itself warrants a separate book.
223