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

Creating virtual cultures for global online communities
organization and its supply chain partners, customers, and
sources of expertise.
Clearly, one would expect to see considerable differences in the
communications networks, and particularly in how those
networks are used, in organizations that are at different stages of
development.
11.4.2 Shifting locus of core
competencies
Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) suggest that organizations
need to ‘create their future by harnessing competence in an
enhanced network that includes customers’. They also present
a three-stage model that is summarized in Table 11.2.
Table 11.2 shows that the idea of extending the organization’s
ICT network and changing the nature of its usage to improve
core competencies is a central component of their model.
11.5 The customer as king
In the past, most practitioners and scholars have had a
company-centric focus and have been primarily concerned
with ‘alliances, networks, and collaborations among companies’.
The old idea of the ‘extended enterprise’ (i.e. a central
organization supported by a constellation of supply chain
partners) should give way to the idea of an enhanced network
of traditional suppliers, manufacturers, investors and customers.
Managers need to recognize that consumers are a source
of competence forces. Managers and researchers must focus
on developing relationships with the consumer as the agent
that is most dramatically transforming the industrial system
as we know it rather than just their supply chain partners.
Table 11.3 summarizes the changing role of customers.
Competence now is a function of the collective knowledge
available across the whole of the enhanced network and the
market has become a forum in which consumers play an
active role in creating and competing for value. The Internet is
given as one of the main reasons that consumers have been
increasingly engaging themselves in active and explicit dialogue
with manufacturers of products and services and dialogue
is no longer being controlled by corporations.
233