We have benefited from our discussions with Kristian Kreiner, Paul Hirsch and Roger Dunbar. We have also benefited from inputs that were offered by participants at the Path Dependence and Creation workshop,

Abstract The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it new forms of IT-enabled intermediation, virtual supply chains, rapidly changing electronic commerce technologies, increasing knowledge intensity, and unprecedented sensitivity for time-to-market by customers. Customers are demanding more value, customized to their exact needs, at less cost, and as quickly as possible. The enterprises that will survive in such a demanding environment will need to innovate and invent new ways of creating value, and will require different enterprise architectures and different IT infrastructures. This article focuses on providing a framework for guiding an enterprise as it transforms itself to function more effectively in the electronic economy. Using the distribution industry in general and Marshall Industries in particular as a context, the article draws insights for transforming an extended enterprise's architecture and its IT infrastructure to enable new ways of creating value in ...

2007, Vol. 50, No. 1, 25–32.

In most companies two factors play a crucial role: managing the knowledge that is necessary for doing business and managing the hardware and software infrastructure that supports the business processes. Usually, business processes and infrastructure are not optimally aligned. We investigate how principles from knowledge management can be applied to enable the creation, consolidation, conservation and continuous actualization of knowledge about valuable software systems ("software assets") that are part of the infrastructure. Our point of departure is a generic framework for knowledge creation proposed by Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka. We investigate the explicit and tacit knowledge about software assets that may exist in an organization and specialize the framework to obtain a strategy for creating new knowledge about these software assets. By applying this strategy, one can optimize the quality and the flexibility of the software assets while reducing costs.

There are many goals for outsourcing information technology: for instance, cost reduction, speed to market, quality improvement, or new business opportunities. Based on

Deregulation, unstable financial markets, increasing global competition, advances in information and communication technologies- these are only a few of the conditions driving the escalating pace of change evident within business communities today. Harnessing an organisation of people who thrive on the challenges of ambiguity, complexity and uncertainty and who can successfully and rapidly implement strategic and operational changes, is seen as a differentiating core competence for competitive companies. Today, technology and information systems are usually key enabling factors when organisations embrace major change strategies, but it is becoming evident that to leverage strategic opportunities from advances in information systems and enabling technologies such as the internet, intranets and e-commerce, good change management practices must be adopted. In this paper we derive a framework for assessing training programmes for change agents, based on an extensive review of the literature on change management models and the skills and competencies necessary to manage change successfully. This framework provides a basis for identifying pedagogical objectives for teaching change management to executives, IT specialists, change agents and change recipients. As an illustration, the framework is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer based multimedia simulation, a training tool known as the EIS Simulation, in satisfying these pedagogical objectives. 1.

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This is the pre-copy-edited draft. Emendations and corrections resulted from copy-editing.

This paper contributes to the development of a critical understanding of strategic management. We provide a brief outline of strategic management as it is conventionally taught and practiced, pointing to several avenues for developing critical approaches. In the broadest sense, a critical perspective stands outside of the managerialist orientation in order to study strategy as an organizational process. We review work in the processual school that purports to describe how strategy is ‘really ’ made, from bargaining, constructivist, and emergent perspectives. We argue that processual approaches hold some promise but quickly move toward prescriptive managerialism. A second, more profound critique draws from critical theory and postmodern insights to question the social and political effects of strategic management. Strategy can be viewed as a set of practices and discourses which promotes instrumental rationality, reproduces hierarchical relations of power, and systematically privileges the interests and viewpoints of particular groups. While this approach has been valuable in probing the ideology of strategy, its focus on discourse and lack of concern with the ‘truth of strategy ’ is a potential weakness. A third approach draws from Gramsci to offer an historical materialist perspective, which pays more attention to the content of strategy. We argue that the strategic deployment of discursive, organizational, and economic resources in sustaining or challenging hegemony suggests a strategic concept of power and a political perspective on corporate strategies to exercise market power, discipline labour, influence government policies, and resist pressures from social groups. It also points to a more encompassing vision of emancipation strategies than that offered by critical theory.

The successful timing of organizational activities depends not only on effective planning and coordination, but also temporal responsiveness – the ability of organizational actors to adapt the timing of their activities to unanticipated events. In this paper, we examine the individuallevel dynamics underlying temporal responsiveness: we examine how organizational actors evaluate timing changes; e.g., changes from existing organizational schedules, routines, expectations, and plans. We review a broad body of psychological, economic, sociological, anthropological and organizational research on time to introduce a reference point model of how people perceive and evaluate time in organizations. We extend these findings to examine the psychology of how changes in timing are valued. Several propositions are presented about personal schedule changes and how individual actors evaluate them. When Plans Change 3