Modeling Inter- and Intra-Organizational Coordination in Electronic Commerce Deployments

Successful Electronic Commerce (EC) requires not only a transformation of the supply chain but a redesign of organizational processes as well. Just as the organizations in a supply chain must cooperate with each other to achieve a collective goal, so too do the departments and groups which comprise an organization depend on each other to achieve the organization's goals. A lack of coordination at either of these levels can result in poor performance and high coordination costs. In addition, changes in inter-organizational dependencies can affect the dependencies within the affected organizations. The lack of coordination across two levels results in transition gap in transforming the inter-organizational design to the intra-organizational design in EC deployments. The purpose of this research is to develop a coordination modeling method for the linkage between inter- and intra-organizations in EC deployments. The method was applied to the EC development project of a cable TV home-shopping company. The coordination approach enabled us to manage dependencies among the coordination elements and identify the effect of a change on other elements, which became the basis for effective EC deployments. We will discuss the method and compare it with other dependency management methods.