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Many of the innovative
business models of the e-business sector capitalized
upon recent managerial ideas and approaches that
represent a trend toward the greater adoption of the
scientific approach to the management of business
operations. In many ways, and especially in the
context of e-business dot-com startups, these ideas
were pushed to their limits in terms of operational
implementation. For example, consider the idea of
focusing on core competencies in operations and
outsourcing support functions, an idea that has been
popular in business management since the late 1980s.
Many e-business startups exploited this approach to an
extreme extent as a means of getting “off the ground”
quickly with the minimal amount of investment in
operational infrastructure. Many such ventures tried
to remain completely “virtual” as informational
intermediaries while relying completely upon
third-party manufacturers, distributors, warehousing
partners, and application service providers (ASP) for
their total physical and technical operations. This
was advantageous as it minimized the investment tied
up in operational infrastructure, gave them
flexibility to change their business models and
operations on the basis of the feedback of their “experimentation,”
and protected them from the day-to-day realities of
managing physical business operations.
However,
this outsourcing approach to business operations
necessitates a newer and different set of operational
managerial skills that focuses on cross-functional
project management and interorganizational
coordination through strategic operations partners.
Thus, in a sense operations management in e-business
requires quite a different approach. Managers still
need the traditional focus on operational detail and
optimization, but this has to be combined with a more
pronounced strategic understanding of the various
aspects of operations and the ability to work through
other organizational units as well.
While
emphasizing the operational challenges of e-business
innovation especially during the e-business
implementation stage, the cases in this Theme also
capture the entrepreneurial orientation of such
efforts. This is done irrespective of whether the
organizational context is that of a large Old Economy
corporate hierarchy or that of a new startup
e-business venture. This theme of the book also
attempts to demonstrate that success at
entrepreneurial innovation requires paying careful
attention to operational details from both intra- and
interorganizational perspectives. The readings and
cases of this Theme also highlight the role that
information technology and business processes play in
e-business innovation. It is argued that the high
failure rates of the business process reengineering (BPR)
revolution of the early 1990s can be attributed to the
immaturity of the technology solutions that could not
meet the ambitious productivity targets of BPR
projects. These technology solutions are now much more
sophisticated, and mature enough to help make the
large productivity gains of e-business operations
possible. There are now suggestions that a
third-generation process reengineering revolution is
currently under way, one based on innovation in
e-business processes and operations. The ShoppeShoppe,
iQLinux, and FishMarket cases of this Theme emphasize
these aspects by focusing on how they are transforming
existing business processes and supply chains.
Another
key aspect of e-business innovation is the close link
between e-business strategy and e-business operations.
All the cases in this Theme attempt to explicitly
illustrate the various dimensions of this link.
Innovation processes necessitate market-based
experimentation in terms of e-business models and
operations, especially in a new and dynamic field such
as e-business. Readers of the book are encouraged to
use the contextual data of the cases to explore how
e-business strategy impacts e-business operations and
how feedback from e-business operations helps reshape
e-business strategy.
Part 1: Operations
in E-Business
Part 2: Supply
Chain Management |