Organizational Structure Paper
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The purpose of this assignment is to discuss how the organizational and operational structures of a business are influenced by eBusiness strategy. All too often, companies feel compelled to jump head first into digital marketplaces, missing out on opportunities. These same companies are then challenged with a new way of processing standard transactions that become not so standard anymore. eBusiness allows a business to perform many daily routine tasks automatically and remotely. Businesses now must consider these automated tasks when staffing, as fewer employees are needed to monitor systems to ensure that all is going as planned.
As stated by Mazur (2000), e-commerce is quickly broadening to include the idea of marketing as too important to preserve of any one department. In most established businesses the initial stages of e-commerce have been about reducing operational costs and improving supply chain management on the one hand, and about marketing and customer relationships on the other. As suggested by Mazur (2000), e-commerce initiatives might come under marketings wing, or anyone who seems to know what is going on. Additionally, Mazur (2000) references the main reasons given for pursuing e-commerce strategies were to increase brand equity, deepen customer relationships and increase market share – all the traditional preserves of marketing, making it seem natural. Mazur (2000) offers some statistics as well in this article as follows: e-commerce resides in the marketing department of only 16% of the companies surveyed, compared with 17% placing it in IT, 14% in what is called multiple operations, 13% in sales/business development and 13% have given it to the heads of the operations. In this article, Mazur (2000) also comments that the forecast is that e-commerce will shift away from marketing and IT toward those in charge of multiple operations and strategic business units. End result of this shift is that senior executives may begin to take over the direction of what were once marketing duties as responsibility moves up the line.
As referenced by Meader (2000), businesses are having to outsource automated transaction functions to companies whose core competency is leveraging the internet to automate information exchange. As further stated by Meader (2000), eBusiness opportunities may be generalized into five main categories of initiatives: supplier-facing, customer-facing, digital marketplaces, transportation management, and intra-enterprise connectivity.