Establishing the Business of the Future:: the Role of Organizational Architecture and Information Technologies

Chris Sauer and Leslie Willcocks

European Management Journal, 2003, vol. 21, issue 4, 497-508

Abstract: In the past, when the commercial world was relatively stable and the future plannable, organizational structure was appropriately the principal instrument of strategy. Now that strategy is more about intent than long-term plans, more about pasting and prototyping than planning for D-Day, companies need to start preparing for the future differently. The paper arises from a 98-corporation study of building e-business infrastructure. A particularly complex and pervasive issue was the fit between technology infrastructure and strategic intent and structure. Several companies were observed to be developing what we call here an Organizational Architecture capability to manage the problems they experienced. Here, using the case study base, we develop the rationale and content of such a capability, and show its key tie in to leveraging IT applications and infrastructure.

Keywords: Organizational; architecture; Design; Information; technologies; Dynamic; strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237303000781
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:21:y:2003:i:4:p:497-508

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/115/bibliographic

Access Statistics for this article

European Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Haenlein

More articles in European Management Journal from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().