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1 © 2004, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management e-Strategy Model for Creating Flexible Organizations Sushil K. Sharma Department of Information Systems and Operations Management Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306, USA [email protected] Jatinder N. D. Gupta Department of Accounting and Information Systems The University of Alabama in Huntsville Huntsville, AL 35899, USA [email protected] Abstract Management literature argues that flexibility in organizations can enhance corporate responsiveness and can create competitive advantages. In the new internet-driven economy, flexibility and rapid response are the keys to business success. The challenge is to structure a leaner, more customer focused and flexible organization to remain competitive in the global economy, especially in e-business. Creating an e-strategy requires comprehensive knowledge of every aspect of business, from core operational needs to competitive forces to technology priorities. So far, research on flexible organizations has emphasized only the operations management perspective and not the strategy perspective. This paper presents a conceptual framework of an e-strategy model that suggests considering flexibility at all levels. The model proposes that flexibility has to be considered at external stakeholders levels such as customers, partners, competitors and suppliers, as well as at internal organizational levels that include people, processes and technology.
Keywords : e-business strategy, e-commerce, e-strategy, flexibility, IS/IT strategy giftjourn@l Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management 2004, Vol. 5, Nos. 2 & 3, pp 1-9 Framework Introduction The major driver in many business domains today is the use of internet-based technologies to open new market opportunities, deliver improved services to customers, and streamline internal business processes. The internet has profoundly altered today’s business environment by redefining business processes and changing the dynamics of relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers (Wargin and Dobiey, 2001). E-business is defined as the ‘use of electronic networks and associated technologies to enable, improve, enhance, transform or invent a business process or business system to create superior value for current or potential customers (Sawhney and Zabin, 2001). E-business is really all about new business models, strategies, and tactics that are made possible with the capabilities of the internet and related technologies. E-business is changing the competitive landscape of virtually every industry (Sharma and Gupta 2001, Sharma and Gupta 2003a, Sharma and Gupta 2003b).
In the present phase of e-business, companies and organizations are moving beyond integrating their various processes to sense and respond to fluctuating market conditions in real time (Boulton, Libert and Samek, 2000).
To cope with those changes, business firms have to be responsive, focused, flexible and resilient. E-business technologies are a collection of technologies, such as web sites, browsers, electronic procurement software, desk-top video conferencing tools, intelligent database search engines, computer supported co-operative working packages,and many other technologies, as well as the web-enabling of more traditional and familiar software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems. E-business affects all aspects of the enterprise: the way new products are developed; methods of working with suppliers and distributors; delivery of goods and services to customers; and so on. However, this makes the choice of a developing e-business strategy more difficult (Angehrn 1997, Anonymous 2001, Khoong 2001).
As organizations adapt their business processes and models to compete in the e-business environment, e-business strategy is recognized as a critical imperative for success.
Companies like Amazon.com., Dell.com, and Cisco.com have adopted the right kinds of e-business strategies and have been dominant players in the e-business market. But many others who either tried to emulate these companies or planned their own strategies could not survive. For example, Compaq didn’t become Dell even when it announced it was selling direct like Dell. Although every company that offers e-commerce solutions claims that it has adopted e-business strategy, recent surveys indicate that many companies do not have an e-business strategy at all or if they do, it is not well integrated with business strategy (Anonymous, 2001).
The key objectives of 21 st century organizations are conducting much of their business online, innovating, ensuring low cost production, and striving for customer excellence. Although many organizations have begun offering products and services online, many of them suffer 2 giftjourn@l Today, flexibility is a key factor in business success. One possible response to the new business environment is development of a fluid and flexible conceptual framework (internal structure – People, processes and Technology) that can respond quickly to changed circumstances. Sushil K. Sharma and Jatinder N. D. Gupta from several typical technology pitfalls: failure to integrate technology with business strategy, technology not linked with customer offerings, and services and systems remaining as fragmented systems, to name a few. To keep organizations competitive, policy makers will have to overhaul the process of formulating and implementing strategic initiatives to explicitly consider flexibility at various levels in the organization. Many challenges confront companies as they formulate their organizational strategy to create flexibility in business processes. Thus, organizations are obliged to continuously explore new and innovative strategies, and to seek powerful methodologies that will confer competitive advantage.
Management literature argues that flexibility in organizations can enhance corporate responsiveness and can create competitive advantages. Creating an effective e-strategy requires a comprehensive knowledge of everything from core operational needs to competitive forces to technology priorities. So far, research on organizational flexibility has been conducted mainly from the perspective of operations management only and not from a strategy perspective (Gupta and Goyal, 1989). This paper presents a conceptual framework of an e- strategy model that suggests considering flexibility at all levels. The model proposes that flexibility has to be considered at external stakeholders levels, such as customers, partners, competitors and suppliers, as well as at internal organizational levels that include people, processes and technology.
Flexibility and e-Business In Webster’s Dictionary, “flexible” is defined as “a ready capability to adapt to new, different or changing requirements.” In a manufacturing context, it can apply to either production growth and volume increases or to physical changes in an existing product.
Because of the multitude of choices available to customers, today, flexibility is a key factor in business success. Flexible companies are able to respond rapidly to changes in their markets, and can play an active role in shaping these changes. Versatility is having the agility and resilience throughout and beyond the enterprise to create or maximize market opportunities. Not surprisingly then, it is suggested that the organizations should offer solutions for isolating, extending and modifying the business rules that drive the processes within digital value chain (Porter 2001, D’souza and Williams 2000). Flexibility is an effective means by which an e-business can hedge against uncertainty in a swiftly changing environment. Systems, applications, and business processes—in short, the entire environment supporting e-business—must seamlessly adapt to changes without costly and time-consuming infrastructure overhauls (Shi and Daniels, 2003).Becoming flexible is becoming imperative for survival.
There are several dimensions to becoming a flexible organization including the following: creating a responsive internal environment that can quickly react to any change in the marketplace, planned or unforeseen, a threat or an opportunity. Second, an organization should have variable cost structures to manage costs in proportion to growth of the organization or change in demand. Third, an organization needs to be focused on what is profitable and core to the enterprise’s success. Finally, the organization needs to have a resilient infrastructure that is available around the world and around the clock (Phan, 2001).
The development of multi-capability organizations requires the rethinking of many underlying assumptions.
Flexibility must be built into facilities, equipment, systems, people and organizations.
Flexibility is the ability to respond appropriately to a wide variety of business conditions. Financial viability, human capital and technical infrastructure are just a few examples of factors that will affect the flexibility of an organization. Flexible organizations mandate that business processes are integrated end-to-end, enabling it to respond with flexibility and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat (Shi and Daniels 2003, Sethi and Sethi 1990).
As organizations use real-time information to accelerate an increasing number of business processes, flexibility and adaptability become fundamental requirements for supporting today’s—and tomorrow’s—business imperatives (Davidson, 1999). Agile, cost-effective responses to business and technology changes differentiate successful companies from their competition. The ability of organizations to use, adjust, or redeploy not only technology but also human resources and capital assets is a cornerstone of business agility. The flexibility of an organization also comes from its ability to create custom-quality products in short production runs, on- demand, inter-spliced with production of other products on the same production line, at low cost, with high reliability, and low cycle time. In a flexible business, the production flexibility itself may be located at any global location internal or external to the knowledge-source of the organization. Flexibility is also the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change. By developing an e-strategy framework, it is possible to measure the state of flexibility within an organization and identify weaknesses so that the organization can implement solutions to improve its agility.
e-Business flexibility determines an organization’s ability to adapt to changes and uncertainties in its business environment, both internal and external. In addition to general business flexibility, e-Business flexibility reflects an organization’s ability to react to those environmental variables that are particularly associated with information 3 © 2004, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management This paper presents a conceptual framework of e-strategy model that suggests considering flexibility at all levels. The model proposes that flexibility has to be considered for external stakeholders, such as customers, partners, competitors and suppliers, and internal structure – People, processes and Technology level.
e-Strategy Model for Creating Flexible Organizations technologies and new ways of doing business which are enabled by these technologies. The dramatic and continuing decrease in the cost of a broad range of technologies (e.g., Internet, wireless, and broadband) and the wide use of standards have created numerous opportunities for increasing e-business flexibility, thereby changing the basis of competition. Flexibility is particularly important in an increasingly volatile business environment characterized by intense, global competition, short product life cycles, increased technological innovation, and time-sensitive customer demand. The focus of competition in global marketplaces is increasingly shifting from cost, quality, and service to delivery, flexibility, and innovation (Shi and Daniels 2003, Gupta and Goyal 1989).
Organizations need an appropriate e-strategy framework to gain competitive advantage (Sabherwal and Chan, 2001).
The increasing pace of change in market conditions places a premium on building flexible organizations in the business world. Organizations have to respond by creating fluid and flexible internal structure that can respond quickly to changed circumstances (Kumar, 1987). Old strategies will no longer work in changed circumstances.
Organizations need an e- strategy framework to counter new competition and help create a business strategy that can create flexibility. Criteria for an e- strategy should flow directly from the shared vision (organization’s business and strategic plans) and should be linked to entire value chain (Galliers 1999, Haapaniemi 2001).
e-Strategy Model A comprehensive e-strategy is central to the success of an e-transformation of the enterprise. e-Business takes into consideration the entire set of transactions occurring in a business including strategic and operational decisions.
Hence, thinking about the enterprise from the e-business perspective requires radical thinking of how business is conducted at present and in the future across the enterprise and beyond. e-Business strategy is not an extension of an internet strategy or an IT strategy in an enterprise. In fact, it should flow from the company’s overall business strategy and should be necessarily linked to company’s vision, objectives and goals. No matter the size of the organization and the scope of its business, an e-business plan should be all-inclusive taking into consideration all stakeholders, core competencies and core entities of the enterprise.
Development of such a strategy necessitates a framework that integrates customers, suppliers, enterprise and trading partners (Dutta 1996, Dutta, Kwan and Segev 1998).
The key to e-strategy is finding the balance between flexibility (how easily and quickly people can change to meet the business need) and speed to market (how quicklybusiness practices and technology solutions can change).
Also, when considering an e-business strategy, one must consider the entire supply chain of business – from interaction with customers and end users, production and fulfillment, through to interaction with suppliers (Lapierre, Filitrault and Chebat 1999, Leidner 1999). The e-strategy model is derived from the work of IBM’s Process- Technology-People (P-T-P) Model (Sharpe, 1989) and the Kanungo (2003) e-strategy framework. An e-strategy of an organization is essentially the organizational strategy to strengthen operation in digital space. It is different from an e-commerce strategy in the sense that while an e-commerce strategy encompasses suppliers, channel partners and customers, an e-strategy includes employees as well besides the other components of an e-commerce strategy. e-Strategy can also be termed as e-organization strategy, which encompasses e-business and e-employee. An e-business Strategy is “electronic” in the sense that it is based on the exploitation of information available in electronic form and the corresponding technology (Kanungo, 2003). Kanungo’s model (2003) emphasizes that e-strategy model must consider both the external and internal environment of an organization. While the external environment consists of suppliers, channel partners, customers and competitors, the internal environment consists of internal processes, organizational culture, beliefs and values, norms and its employees.
The P-T-P model of IBM consists of employees (people), activities that those employees perform (processes), and tools that help them perform those activities (technology). It further suggests that an effective e-strategy model for an organization requires flexibility to be built in the enterprise architecture at the people, processes, and technology level (Sharpe, 1989). People need to be knowledgeable about the technologies they operate and operational procedures. It is very important to have people who are ready to learn on a continuous basis and adapt to the changing environment.
Processes build on the notion that all organizations have some form of operational practices and procedures. The new e-business environment depends upon organizations’ ability to adapt to a new, more collaborative, competition model.
To become flexible, organizations have to shift from being product-centric to customer-centric, making customers a part of the organization. Companies cannot continue to compete in today’s frenetic environment with disparate, disconnected IT infrastructures and disintegrated processes or applications.
The organization’s management must understand that new technologies and business models that change industry dynamics and redefine what both shareholders value and customers desire will also change their business processes.
To prepare for that, an organization should work on an operating philosophy that includes changing business processes and business models. Technology; e-business 4 giftjourn@l Many challenges await companies as they formulate their organizational strategy and create flexibility in business processes. enabling technologies infrastructure should be flexible, reliable, scalable and quickly deployed to keep up with the ever-changing, unpredictable advances in technology (Hackbarth and Kettinger, 2000). Customers will expect businesses to serve them via the internet, anytime, anywhere in the world, on any device, at any time. Therefore, it becomes mandatory to create web-based infrastructure that can integrate back-office management systems, customers and business partners to respond to any situation. Properly designed web portals can provide trusted business partners with a secure, flexible environment for activities ranging from self-service to collaborative commerce (Budhwani, 2001).
The proposed e-strategy model is shown in Figure 1. The model indicates that at the bottom most layer, creating flexibility requires enabling e-business technologies. Once the enabling technologies are flexible enough to quickly adapt to a changing market environment, it is important to create flexibility in core processes. The second level of flexibility has to be at the core processes. e-Strategy for creating flexible organization would also demand the workforce to be flexible. Researchers have argued in favor of integrated strategies for digital space (Jarvenpaa and Tiller, 2000). They argue that an e-business strategy model should be integrating various strategies, such as marketing, manufacturing, supply chain and financial strategy. Therefore, all strategies that need to be integrated should flow from shared vision (or view of the firm).
Kanungo (2003) contends that e-strategy must link with the four components of business (customers, suppliers, partners and competitors) because these components influencebusiness strategy. Issues related to suppliers, channel partners and customers are less technological issues than business.
For example, issues like how the purchase process would be managed, what level of integration with suppliers and distributors would be achieved or which products or services would be offered to customers and how, appear to be business oriented than technology oriented. Technology is only a medium or at best serves as a link to maintain these relationships in virtual space (Kanungo 2003, Hackbarth and Kettinger 2000). The details of each layer are described below. Flexible Technology Infrastructure In order to provide the flexibility, scalability and reliability required of e-business, companies need to create a flexible e-business infrastructure. This infrastructure should consist of open interfaces that allow new applications and services to easily connect. The flexible e-business infrastructure should include; universal connectivity through the use of open standards, and integration with internal and external services. Universal connectivity through the use of open standards implies that companies must allow customers, business partners, suppliers, and influencers to have access to systems and applications with a variety of access devices available. Having interoperability to allow sharing or communicating with mixed technologies across and beyond the enterprise is an important success factor in e-business.
e-Business infrastructure should have capability to integrate internal and external services seamlessly. By integrating business applications and data among customers, suppliers, partners and employees, companies can achieve a more effective and efficient e-business model. Enabling integration is accomplished by using open standards-based infrastructure elements in conjunction with an integration, which allows existing application functionality to be integrated with the new application logic (Shi and Daniels, 2003). In today’s e-business on demand environment, integrating information across and beyond the enterprise is a competitive mandate. Initiatives such as customer relationship management, supply chain management and business intelligence are based on successfully integrating information from multiple data sources, both structured and unstructured. Information integration technology enables integrated, real-time access to traditional and emerging data sources, transforms information to meet the needs of business analysts and manages data placement for performance, currency and availability. This, in turn, leads to fast, constant and easy access for customer facing e-business solutions.
Capability to collaborate in the value network resource reconfiguration – sharing data with suppliers, customers, and partners in a value network through XML standards is merely a first step. For the foreseeable future, businesses will have to support multiple points of integration and multiple points of interaction. The organizations must integrate Figure 1 : An e-strategy Model for Flexibility Sushil K. Sharma and Jatinder N. D. Gupta 5 © 2004, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management Businesses today are facing many pressures— pressure to compete in a fast-paced ever-changing climate, pressure to constantly reduce costs to remain competitive. Becoming flexible is becoming imperative for survival. applications with multiple points of interaction, such as Web browsers, interactive voice response units (IVRs), personal digital assistants (PDAs), and mobile phones, so that data is appropriately synchronized and so that various points of interaction represent the brand faithfully. Early e-business initiatives focused on the front-end—with applications such as online stock trading, online auctioning, and industry portals. Now, companies are moving beyond e-business and apply these concepts across the front- and back-ends of enterprise processes. Companies have to move beyond electronic document interchange (EDI) and adopting solutions based on extensible markup language (XML) to facilitate the flow of transactions between business processes and across organizations. Organizations will realize the benefits of a fully adaptive approach when they can easily change business partners or processes without undue cost or conversion time. A strong backbone of systems on which organization will build e-business solutions is an essential component of an e-business strategy. One must evaluate factors such as data integrity, openness of technologies, readiness for integration, and real-time accuracy of data.
Flexible Core Processes Worldwide, organizations are trying to achieve flexibility in all processes and at all levels. This capacity–often called agility–is a prime enabler of success. However, until agility is achieved, aggressive productivity objectives are not being realized. Agility and the productivity will mainly depend on the drivers; the organization’s ability to use its full capacities, build output-oriented teams, implement efficient process orientation, and reach the optimum in performing supply chain management. The inability to rapidly achieve agility reflects the demands imposed by the complexity of process management, highlighting three major roadblocks:
the lack of competency of personnel, the failure to adequately document and make transparent the relationship among process elements and the availability of technological support.
Today, being flexible is more important than ever. Agile assembly systems allow manufacturers to react quickly to shifting customer demands and shorter product life cycles.
They can produce a wider variety of products; alter the mix of options or features; add new processes or assembly stations easily; and change volumes with minimal investment and changeover loss. Successful business growth depends heavily on the ability to update, integrate, customize and deploy applications rapidly and provide fast, reliable, interactive data access to end users, from employees to suppliers, customers and partners. To be effective, organizations must standardize the management of business processes that span multiple applications, corporate departments, and external entities. Comprehensive business integration is required to manage these increasingly complex information resources in a cost-effective manner.
Applications and data stores must be combined using anapproach that not only provides access to the information and business processes within the systems, but also compounds their value as an integrated unit.
It is imperative in today’s business environment for organizations to have a consolidated view of information stored in multiple systems and databases, and a concerted execution of business processes. More organizations are recognizing that the solution lies in finding a way to better integrate existing systems and processes into the organization. Application integration and business process management provide a scalable mechanism for consistently upgrading business processes and integrating existing and future systems to enable efficient information retrieval and performance analysis.
The impact of technologies on business processes, relationships and organization can have much larger ramifications than the technology implementation itself.
Inadequately addressing these process, relationship, and organizational impacts can greatly impede the success of e-business strategy. For e-business to succeed, the technology and processes must work well together. Entirely new processes and roles may be required, for instance to create and manage content delivered over the web, such as product technical information, pricing and other content. It is more important to understand that how various e-business initiatives will impact on processes, business relationships, organization.
Collaborative e-business applications are emerging to solve multi-enterprise integration challenges. New designs, supported by the latest web architectures and B2B standards will usher in a new era of business collaboration in the years ahead (Craig and Jutla, 2000).
Achieving this flexibility will require a new architectural model for applications. Conventional applications are defined by a combination of business logic and a particular set of appropriately structured data. A traditional transaction processing system that uses a relational database cannot easily be merged with a workflow management system based on documents, whether as text or images. Process- based business models promise greater flexibility and extended visibility. Web-services technology and interfaces are becoming a standard part of application integration.
Therefore, companies should migrate from screen-based legacy data integration to more complex, object-like frameworks that enable integration of legacy data into web-services architectures. Flexible Workforce The organization chart of a traditional enterprise had long been defined as a shrinking pyramid with the CEO at the top. The 21st century organization will look like the web; horizontal, a mesh that connects partners, employees, external contractors, suppliers, and customers in various e-Strategy Model for Creating Flexible Organizations 6 giftjourn@l Flexibility needed to be built in to facilities, equipment, systems, people and organizations. forms of collaborations. The players will grow more and more independent. Tomorrow’s corporations will be virtual, defined not by their location but by their ability to acquire knowledge, organize information, and organize independent contractors and suppliers worldwide. To keep ahead of the steep new-product curve, it will be crucial for organizations to attract and retain the best thinkers. Companies will need to build a deep reservoir of talent-employees and free agents to succeed in this new era (Amor 1999, Aalst 2000).
e-Business requires more creative thinking and less bureaucracy. This philosophy must filter into a number of areas, including site design, usability, performance and general capabilities. But it also means thinking up new ways to communicate and developing new business models.
e-Business demands that a team or task force is created that is empowered to make quick decisions. Because e-business overlaps among multiple departments and domains, it is essential to develop teams that can communicate issues and understand the needs and concerns of others. It’s important to eliminate barriers (Cross and Baird 2000, Adeyam 2000).
Organizational changes are considered an important factor for the successful application of e-business technologies.
Such developments should be designed to promote a culture change, team working, more open communi-cations, and so on. These will bring benefits such as improved cross-functional understanding, shorter lead times and lower costs (Levasseur, 2001).
The biggest challenge businesses face in the implementation of e-business strategies is a strong resistance to change. Many companies are finding it difficult to change employee and customer mind-sets on business-process and customer-service issues. Implementing an e-business program would also mean a change in the way the organization conducts its business. Organizations should not only focus on the distribution and supply chain management aspects of e-business, but also other components such as customer relationship management and channels management. As discussed earlier, e-business strategy typically touches on many different processes, organizational elements, and technologies within a company. It is important to actively involve people from across the affected areas of the business.
Having the right mix of personnel involved in the strategy will help contribute ideas on possible e-business opportunities, will help ensure that the e-business vision is grounded in the reality of day-to-day operations, and will help the strategy team understand the organization’s readiness and capacity for the change. In addition, such participation will help foster a broad sense of ownership.
At the same time, input from your customers, suppliers, and partners must be solicited to have their concerns addressed. The organization must understand all aspects of e-business, to make strategy a well-rounded success (Swanson, 2001). Flexibility Through Integration Customers, partners and suppliers expect ready access to the information they need to do business. These expectations translate into real challenges for e-business infrastructure, including application and data integration, personalization, security and scalability. Focusing on external value-chain partners is a major aspect of transformation. Internal sign- offs are being replaced by external relationships, and more of what was done internally is now done externally.
An e-business recognizes that power is shifting to the consumer. In the one-to-many hierarchical information flow that characterized the Industrial Age, information flowed one way, from the producer to the consumers. The Internet has changed this and it has enabled the information flow to be reversed so customer-centric companies can pull information from consumers to improve and customize products.
e-Business creates a collaborative community. The concept of a collaborative community enables collaborative interactions between an enterprise, its suppliers, trading partners, employees and customers. Data and processes once seen as internal to an organization are now shared by the trading community. This structural shift is no small leap and requires a change in mindset to the extent of changing the work culture. Not only the people within an enterprise have to be trained to adapt to this new culture, other members of the community should be convinced to embrace the change. Customer-centric business processes increasingly rely on multiple channels. Thus, for consistent customer service, applications, customer data must be integrated with different databases and applications (Oliver, 2001). The integration of applications, processes and data creates a single view of the customer, prevents discrepancies in customer data, and ensures consistent service of the customer, no matter the channel. In addition, any employee who interacts with customers, no matter where they are in the organization, can access any customer information necessary in order to provide superior service (Papazoglou, Ribbers and Tsalgatidou, 2000).
E-business relationships with customers and suppliers are driven by the exchange of accurate, timely information.
Customers decide to do business with companies based on how quickly they can access their account information from a Web site, or how easily they can choose from a range of service offerings online. Similarly, suppliers are selected based on information they provide about inventory, on time delivery, and so on. Face-to-face interaction is less and less a part of the business equation. To keep business running smoothly, it’s imperative that companies learn to manage these new information-driven relationships. E-business strategy would require an organization to change the organizational culture to incorporate e-business as a key medium or mode of integrated service delivery (Sharma, Krishnan and Grewal 2001). Self-service capabilities (such as account and order inquiry) and the ability to solve Sushil K. Sharma and Jatinder N. D. Gupta 7 © 2004, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management customer problems and improve customer processes will be core to e-business strategy (Noy, 1998).
Conclusions Successful business growth depends heavily on the ability to update, integrate, customize and deploy applications rapidly and provide fast, reliable, interactive data access to end users, from employees to suppliers, customers and partners. e-Business strategies or e-strategies must address how partner, employee, governance, community, and customer facing processes can be e-business enabled.
e-Business enabled means business processes are improved via technological advances, new knowledge management capabilities including content management and relationship management, and online trust capabilities (Jutla et al, 2001).
To be successful with e-business strategies, companies need more than technologically sound information systems. An organization’s processes, people and systems must function symbiotically to meet and exceed stakeholders’ (customer, suppliers, and partners) needs and wants. Companies need to employ customer- focused people at every level of the organization and build processes that are simple to execute and flexible enough to change with changing times.
Integrating customer-focused people, processes and information systems to form a symbiotic relationship will help to create an effective e-business strategy for e-business success. Therefore, in order to develop e-strategy for being flexible, organizations must focus on three interrelated components—people, process, and technology. The e- strategy framework presented in this paper would certainly help organizations to become more responsive and adaptive to its overall business environment and would help to create the flexibility and resiliency. The main theme of this paper is that flexibility need not be considered only in processes but throughout the enterprise in people, processes and technology. Based on the e-strategy model presented in this paper, we contend that e-strategy has to integrate various other strategies (like the information technology and organizational strategies) for creating agility and flexibility.
Therefore, e- strategy is an essential and important part of information technology strategy. While developing an e- strategy, due diligence must to be given to people, processes and technology rather than focusing on only one of the components. Therefore, further research is required to develop systems and procedures that facilitate the implementation of the e-strategy framework proposed in this paper.
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Wargin J. and Dobiey D. (2001) E-business and Change: Managing the Change in the Digital Economy, Journal of Change Management, 2 (1), 72-82. Sushil K. Sharma and Jatinder N. D. Gupta 9 © 2004, Global Institute of Flexible Systems Management Dr. Sushil K. Sharma is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management, at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, USA. Co-author of two textbooks and Co-editor of four books, Dr. Sharma’s research contributions have appeared in many peer-reviewed national and international journals, conferences and seminars’ proceedings. Dr. Sharma’s primary teaching and research interests are in e-commerce, information systems security, ERP systems, database management systems, and knowledge management. Dr. Sharma has wide consulting experience in information systems and e-commerce and has served as an advisor and consultant to several government and private organizations including World Bank funded projects.
Jatinder N. D. Gupta is currently Eminent Scholar of Management of Technology, Professor of Management Information Systems, Industrial and Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, and Chairperson of the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama. Most recently, he was Professor of Management, Information and Communication Sciences, and Industry and Technology at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana.
He holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering (with specialization in Production Management and Information Systems) from Texas Tech University. Co-author of a textbook in Operations Research, Dr. Gupta serves on the editorial boards of several national and international journals. Recipient of the Outstanding Faculty and Outstanding Researcher awards from Ball State University, he has published numerous papers in such journals as Journal of Management Information Systems, International Journal of Information Management, Operations Research, INFORMS Journal of Computing, Annals of Operations Research, and Mathematics of Operations Research. More recently, he served as a co-editor of several special issues including the Neural Networks in Business of Computers and Operations Research and books that included Decision Making Support Systems: Achievements and Challenges for the New Decade published by Idea Group Publishing. His current research interests include e-Commerce, Supply Chain Management, Information and Decision Technologies, Scheduling, Planning and Control, Organizational Learning and Effectiveness, Systems Education, Knowledge Management, and Enterprise Integration. Dr. Gupta has held elected and appointed positions in several academic and professional societies including the Association for Information Systems, Production and Operations Management Society (POMS), the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), and the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA). Flexibility Mapping : Practitioner's Perspective 1. What types of flexibilities do you see in the practical situation "e-strategy" on the following points: z Flexibility in terms of “options” z Flexibility in terms of “change mechanisms” z Flexibility in terms of “freedom of choice” to participating actors.
2. Identify and describe the types of flexibilities that are relevant for your own organizational context?
On which dimensions, flexibility should be enhanced?
3. Try to map your own organization on the following continua (Please tick mark in the appropriate boxes) Flexible Technology Infrastructure Low High Flexibility through Core Processes Low High Product Design Architecture ClosedOpen Flexibility in Workforce Low High Flexibility through Shared Vision Low High 4. Develop a SAP-LAP (Situation Actor Process-Learning Action Performance) model of “e-strategy” relevant to your organization. Reflecting Applicability in Real Life 1. In your organization, what type of flexibility exists? On the basis of the framework presented in this paper, what areas of flexibility require work? How will you go about achieving it?
2. In your organization, what strategic decisions require explicit consideration of various types of flexibility?
How would you organize to accomplish this? e-Strategy Model for Creating Flexible Organizations
