E-commerce organizational structure (extended abstract)

Abstract

In expanding into e-commerce, clicks and mortar companies have many options. They can outsource all of the e-commerce related activities to firms specializing in those tasks. They can bring in new employees with the required skills — either integrating them into work units with current employees or setting up new e-commerce units. They can retrain or redirect existing employees. Or they can combine these approaches.This paper reports on the first phase of a three-phase project that studies how contemporary businesses structure their IS areas to take advantage of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The research studies established businesses in order to understand how they implement their business-to-business e-commerce.A preliminary set of interviews looked at four firms (all company names have been disguised) in Canada and the United States that actively conduct business-to-business e-commerce and that had well-established IS groups prior to the move to e-commerce. The first firm, Technology and Software (T/S), was a Canadian plant automation design firm that employs 400 individuals, 40 of them in IS. Its first e-commerce application involved a Y2K compliance database which began as a client-defined project and evolved into a commercial product. The second company examined was Commercial Insurers (C/I), an international commercial and personal insurance company based in the U.S. With 9500 employees worldwide (approximately 1000 in IS), the company conducts web-based business with its independent agents and brokers at multiple levels. U.S. Office Supplier (UOS) is a major office products supplier with 12,000 employees and an IS group of 270. Its e-commerce systems provide online ordering, catalogue searching, and order tracking for its customers. The fourth company studied was Canadian Office Supplier (COS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of U.S. Office Supplier. With 2,100 employees (50 in IS), the company's systems are similar to those of its parent but were developed independently and, in some cases, first.Each of the firms used a different organization structure to develop and build its e-commerce systems. T/S began with an internal project team, but ultimately moved to a product team staffed from existing IS personnel. C/I created a business applications group drawn from outside the IS group (responsible for developing applications) and an internal technical group for the technical infrastructure needed to deliver e-commerce. UOS, which hired new IS staff and contract programmers, created a new e-commerce unit reporting to the marketing area. COS, on the other hand, used a team of COS managers for ideas and oversight, but outsourced all programming and implementation.This paper proposes a model for future research that distinguishes the structural options according to two dimensions. It goes on to describe the possible normative and predictive uses of the model, as well as the mechanisms for validating those uses.