Electronic Commerce and Organizational Transformation

The development of electronic commerce offers a promising way for businesses to meet challenges of the ever-changing market. It induces and enables organizations to redesign their business processes and organizational structures to meet the new business requirements. The gains from technology development alone are elusive. To reap the real benefits from electronic commerce, we need to tackle the more challenging but potentially more rewarding problems of improving the conduct of business. Electronic commerce always puts business process reengineering on the strategic agenda.A norm-oriented approach enables us to differentiate the substantive, productivity-related activities from the bureaucratic procedures. The substantive activities form the stable kernel of the business functions that must be preserved through any changes to the bureaucratic procedures. In this way, we encourage organizations to devote most of its energy to the substantive kernel, while necessary redesign of business processes can be carried out systematically. Hammer, the champion of reengineering, gave a number of precepts which the process should aim to achieve, but he proposed no methods of diagnosis and redesign. We demonstrate how our approach leads to Hammer's precepts being satisfied.