TABLE OF CONTENTS With the advent of the Internet and e-commerce and the increasing transformation of business through the expanding use of ever more reliable and powerful IT, business is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This interconnectedness, arguably, helps business face challenging contemporary environments increasingly characterized by a global span of business operations, turbulence, change and uncertainty, innovation, hypercompetitiveness and the like. In this chapter we shall discuss how the interconnected world of business spawns new organizational forms. Important among these is a virtual corporation of collaborating partners, linked and communicating with the help of modern IT. We generalize the virtual organizational form and talk about an interconnected strategic business network of a business, its business partners, its suppliers and potentially its customers. In this context we introduce the new term, if not entirely new construct, of 'coopetition' to describe the information and resource-sharing strategies that are replacing naked aggression and competition in many business contexts.
Most effective modern corporations, we believe, are embedded in strategic business networks to a greater or lesser extent. In this chapter we look at approaches to strategy formulation for virtual organizations or strategic business networks, commenting on the need for some changes in emphasis in strategy formulation, given the realities of contemporary business environment.
As the use of computers and telecommunications has changed over time, so too have the approaches to planning the utilization of an organization's information, information systems (IS), and information technology (IT).
The established approaches to information...
