The Success Of E Business - 1434 Words

Despite the dot.com collapse, there remains a strong belief that e-business – with its resurgent potential for creating new transactional opportunities between firms, suppliers, complementary product/service providers and customers – will ultimately contribute significantly to the future performance of many established firms. A number of impressive examples come to mind: Tesco in the UK, Otto Versand in Germany, and Dell Computers and Cisco Systems in the US.1 For organizations such as these, e-business is more than a tool but part of a deeply held strategic disposition that enables them to outperform the competition.2 Yet, in spite of these high-profile success stories many other similarly situated firms have failed to duplicate these†¦show more content†¦Both questions are of practical importance because they tap into the organizational reasoning that takes place to explicate and justify e-business applications. Unraveling this reasoning is also of theoretica l importance to the information technology (IT) literature in that it underlies the extent to which organizational success is determined by strategy content and/or process.3 Although intuitively linked to one another, the content and process perspectives have evolved independently (see Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1996) for an extensive review). For example, a large body of content research shows that various structural considerations influence performance. These antecedents are both external and internal to the firm. The former is defined by economic, technological, political and competitive forces (Pettigrew, 1992) and the later by core competencies (Hamel and Prahalad, 1994) and dynamic capabilities (Teece et al., 1997). Both the external and internal schools of thought have been used to explain variation in IT-related performance (e.g., Porter, 2001; Wade and Holland, 2004). The process school of thought is concerned with those activities leading to and supporting a choice of strategy (Huff and Reger, 1987) and its implementation (Thompson and Strickland, 2001). Explaining how strategy should be executed is the role of process research. This approach seeks the richness of a more