For a market-oriented organisation it is not enough to be focused on customers and competitors; it is necessary to be responsive to changes in the market (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). In a large organisation this involves a high degree of interfunctional coordination (Narver and Slater, 1990). Small focused teams have been instrumental in forcing through change in both Buildsoc and Interbank. The Buildsoc marketing manager recognises the benefit of smaller group decision-making to short cut bureaucratic processes: I think a lot of people are warming to the idea that the business should be making the decisions in smaller groups and those smaller groups reporting their decisions to other groups, not necessarily inviting other groups to comment. There's got to be a corporate ownership and a greater level of trust in people's decision making . . . so I think the e-development has been a great stimuli to say do we really have to make decisions this slow and have committee meetings all over the place?
This is also recognised by the Buildsoc retail operations manager who suggests: The answer might be to make yourself small in the way you operate, but within a big context. That sounds a bit odd, but if you look at the companies that seem to be able to produce things very quickly [they] are very small companies. Then they get big and that slows them down. It's a question of acting small but being big, if that makes sense.
The need to see across the organisational strands and also focus on the shortest timeline for implementation is challenging and is not something that traditional management training has prepared people for (Smith, 1998). It requires seeing the detail for each area and type of person involved, while also keeping the big picture in mind. This cannot be hierarchical (Miles et al., 2000) and traditional rules do not always apply. In Buildsoc and Interbank small teams with the heavyweight support of their respective chief executive were seen to be the best way of overcoming some of the challenges in getting change projects underway. However this was not the end of the story. Getting a change initiative underway is only the start, it then needs to be fully integrated within the organisation.
In order to take advantage of the benefits of e-commerce Porter (2001) stresses the imperative for companies to develop tailored value chains to build up defensible competitive advantage. This involves a high degree of cross-activity integration, for instance sales activities linked with order processing. There is an appreciation from the Insco marketing manager that the response to e-commerce should be integrated: It's not just marketing, it's not just IT, it's product development, it's the whole business and I think people aren't aware of that enough across the business to be thinking in those terms.
Despite the initial success of getting the e-commerce projects off the ground, in some of the case studies, there were very real challenges identified in developing and sustaining an integrated and coordinated cross-functional approach to long-term implementation, where it was taking place within the existing organisation. In the Interbank case study the creation of the separate operation seems to have overcome some of these by sidestepping the issue. The point is that, for an existing company doing business on the Internet, a range of organisational issues arise requiring major adjustments to the organisational infrastructure: culture, people and structures (Boddy and Boonstra, 2000). But changes to mental models and norms (Kondra and Hinings 1998) can be psychologically threatening (Ashkenas, 2000). Therefore it needs to be recognised that the strategic Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252±260 decision to develop an innovation will have massive organisational implications (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The size of the challenge is neatly summed up by the Insco e-commerce manager: The company started in [date] ± 150 years odd of doing things by paper, it is hard to move the whole organisation and there are few visionaries around that realise that.
The issue of implementation of strategy is recognised in the major market orientation models, however it can be argued that this element is explained less than comprehensively. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) have less to say on responsiveness than intelligence generation or dissemination, but it is at the core of their model. Responsiveness is the action taken in response to market trends, involving virtually all departments in the organisation. However Jaworski and Kohli (1993) acknowledge that their analysis does not shed much light on the change process. In the alternative model of Narver and Slater (1990) the mechanics of responding to change in an integrated manner is described as interfunctional coordination. To accomplish this effectively companies need to develop horizontal structures and manage projects through small multi-functional teams (Slater and Narver, 1994), but they also need to become learning organisations (Slater and Narver, 1995). They agree with Day (1994) that superior ability to learn is critical because of the acceleration of technological change and the need to development distinct competencies to achieve competitive advantage. However they accept that there is no widely accepted theory of what comprises the culture and climate of a learning organisation.
0 comments
Post a Comment