E-business and the virtual organization – a new rationale for 21st century organizations
Introduction
As we enter the new millennium, there is a general feeling that there is a new social and economic reality, largely based on new communication technologies. We cannot open a book or magazine without seeing assertions, more or less supported by evidence, that we are entering a new age. In particular, this applies to the world of business, transformed as it has been by a number of powerful forces such as globalization and the advent of the Internet. There is a sense that the world of business is significantly different from even 20 years ago. This is exemplified by the prevalence of terms such as ‘new economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘digital economy’ ‘knowledge age’ and so on. These terms suggest, rather imprecisely, that we have a new business reality, and that the role of IT and the Internet are significant, or perhaps even defining features or characteristics of that new business reality.
There are two broad constructs that help to structure and make some sense of this new reality if they are defined and thought about clearly: namely the ‘new economy’ and the ‘Internet economy.’ In this chapter we shall introduce these notions as fundamental constructs for the rest of the book. There is a sense in which trends such as globalization and the effective use of increasingly more powerful and reliable IT have transformed the national economies of the USA, Japan and Europe to such an extent that when referring to, say, the contemporary US economy, we could meaningfully talk about something called the ‘new economy’. A separate construct refers to the economy that is clustered around the Internet and the new electronic commerce or e-business phenomenon. Finall ...