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

Creating virtual cultures for global online communities
Another mistake made by Intel, back in 1994, was to underestimate
the power of, and fail to monitor the discussions of,
their end-users who had become welded into a powerful virtual
community by the Internet.
Today, Intel posts all known flaws on the Internet to avoid a
recurrence of this problem. It also provides a number of both
technical and non-technical support forums for its user community.
As Intel now say:
The support that Intel provides with electronic messaging (email and
support forums) provides the same technical expertise that can be
found on the telephone as well as the instant documentation that can
be found with self-help services. With publicly accessible forums, you
have all of the benefits of email technical support, with the added
benefit of the option of viewing previous messages written by other
participants, and participating with pertinent suggestions and tips
that can help others (Intel 1999).
These forums also allow Intel to engage in conversation with
their user communities and become a member of those
communities.
However, we are not just concerned with the increasing power
of virtual groups of consumers. We are also very much
concerned with the nature and role of markets and how they
should be regarded as communities.
11.7 Community building through ICT
Returning to Venkatraman and Henderson’s concept of
e-communities we might expect to see ICT vendors starting to
market products aimed specifically at virtual community building.
This has in fact happened. Indeed, in the ERP software
arena product developments have taken place almost exactly in
accordance with the model.
Consider the developments in SAPs, the premier ERP software
vendor, product line (R/3) since the mid-1990s. Prior to the
launch of release 3.1, in 1997, R/3 provided comprehensive and
highly integrated functionality for virtually all of an organization’s
internal business processes. However, it had no real
facilities for interconnecting with either business partners or
customers. Even traditional EDI was only supported if third
party products were bolted onto R/3.
The launch of release 3.1H, in 1997, was the addition of a basic
Internet transaction server layer to the traditional three-layer
237