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78 Lubbe
Bloodgood and Salisbury (1999) claim that organizations may need to change
the manner in which they operate. A change could eventually affect alignment.
According to Bloodgood and Salisbury, there are two characteristics of the degree
of knowledge creation, transfer and protection and the degree of tacitness of the
organization’s knowledge. These factors are considered the most influential in
determining success of e-commerce in facilitating strategic change. Remember that
any change in strategy will also facilitate a change in the alignment of the
organization’s strategy. Any changes in the strategy for e-commerce should keep
corporate strategy in mind.
Organizations that use a knowledge creation strategy focus on economic
creativity and experimentation to construct new knowledge for developing new
products and services. New services such as the social impact of the Internet can
and will affect the alignment of the strategies and should help with competitive
advantage. Bloodgood and Salisbury state that to understand tacit knowledge is
important to understand how strategic change may be accomplished and supported
by e-commerce. They claim that reconfiguring with new resources combines both
tacit and explicit knowledge in an effort to create something new and somewhat
difficult to imitate. This new and difficult-to-imitate creation would have to be in
alignment; this is what managers have to keep this in mind while planning the
knowledge creation.
Long-range economic alignment and forecasts need unbiased evaluation of the
use of technologies in actions such as e-commerce, but users must remember that
everything will change drastically during the next three years. If organizations do not
align their strategies, the alternative is to go bust. The question that they must ask
before they align the strategies is, “What would they do if they were starting from
scratch?” Competitors might be doing just that and they can compare at the same
time what influence the e-commerce aspect of business could have on the
organization.
When it comes to putting in new business computing systems and applications
such as e-commerce, “progress” is not measurable in terms of distance from where
the organization started. This measurement would also measure how far the
organization has gone along the economic road to align the strategies unless the
organization cannot see where they are going. This ‘blind’ travelling could be
because the organization did not align all their economic and social strategies. Wellplanned
journeys (alignment) make provisions for measuring how aligned the
strategies are and how far the organization could economically go before the
alignment is unsound and the resources would have to be monitored, measuring the
effect of e-commerce. This measurement could be difficult because nothing is sure
about Internet traffic.
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