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

4 IS planning strategies for emerging business
models
4.1 Introduction
With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce and the
increasing transformation of business through the expanding
use of ever more reliable and powerful IT, business is becoming
increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This interconnectedness,
arguably, helps business face challenging contemporary
environments increasingly characterized by a global
span of business operations, turbulence, change and uncertainty,
innovation, hypercompetitiveness and the like. In this chapter
we shall discuss how the interconnected world of business
spawns new organizational forms. Important among these is a
virtual corporation of collaborating partners, linked and communicating
with the help of modern IT. We generalize the
virtual organizational form and talk about an interconnected
strategic business network of a business, its business partners,
its suppliers and potentially its customers. In this context we
introduce the new term, if not entirely new construct, of
‘coopetition’ to describe the information and resource-sharing
strategies that are replacing naked aggression and competition
in many business contexts.
Most effective modern corporations, we believe, are embedded
in strategic business networks to a greater or lesser extent. In
this chapter we look at approaches to strategy formulation for
virtual organizations or strategic business networks, commenting
on the need for some changes in emphasis in strategy
formulation, given the realities of contemporary business
environment.