The Enabling Role of Information Technologies on the Emergence of New Organizational Forms

Special Issue

Abstract

During the last years, a consensus is emerging that to survive in the competitive turbulence that is engulfing a growing number of industries, firms will need to pinpoint innovative practices rapidly, to communicate them to their suppliers and to stimulate further innovation. In order to be competitive, companies are forced to adopt less hierarchical and more flexible structures, and to define strategies able to combine reduced costs, high quality, flexibility and a quick answer to customer requirements. Nowadays, there are very few companies with enough resources to form its value chain on their own. Therefore, some changes are taking place within individual companies and in their relations with other organizations, creating new structures in which relationships between customers and suppliers are suffering considerable changes. One of these changes is concerned with the formation of networks in which there is a division of labour that allows each company to exploit their distinctive advantages, and be more competitive globally. In a network model, a set of juridically independent companies establish cooperative long term links in order to achieve a higher level of competitiveness. The enterprises that belong to a network have not all the elements needed for manufacturing a product or providing a service under their absolute control. Therefore, the success of this kind of structures is conditioned by the coordination degree obtained along the realization of inter-organizational activities, which requires an efficient communication system among the partners. The Information Technology (IT) represents a supportive element that facilitates the transfer of information across organizational boundaries. In this paper we analyze the inclusion of the Interorganizational Information Systems (IOS) concept within the network model and discuss the role IT plays in enabling organizational transformation towards emergent forms of organization.