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82 Lubbe
collaboration, and agility. These are all overlapping and supportive of each other.
Knowledge creation and sharing (as stated in this article) is the ability to create new
knowledge from available information to help with alignment, while collaboration is
the process of shared creation to draw on the expertise of participants and to be
able to create alignment from this collaboration. Agility is the ability of the
organization to use new knowledge to adapt to external stimulus and use this to
better or ensure total alignment of all strategies. All of these would work better if
the staff motivations were good enough and should be encouraged to ensure that
there would be no atrophy.
Alignment is hard to see, but managers would know it. The combination of all
these mentioned in the paragraphs above should ensure that alignment exists.
Knowledge should also be there to ensure that there is alignment. The organization
should also be sure to take all economic trends into account when aligning strategies.
The question to ask is what skills will be necessary to align e-commerce and
organizational strategies. However, if managers really understand what the organization
is trying to deliver, then they should be able to align strategies. Systems
thinking would therefore help with alignment, because it would ensure that the
alignment and view of the entire organization as an economic and social unit.
On the other hand, reporting on user statistics on Internet sites is far below the
required standards. These statistics could affect the alignment of strategies since no
one can plan around uncertainty. That is why many CEOs have lost faith in the
Internet as communication and business medium of the future. Many ISPs cannot
tell you why the people have ended up on their site and how long they have stayed.
The tracking technologies should solve the problem but nobody can guarantee
anything - it is like TV - it is a guessing game and although the developers of tracking
technology is aware of these problems, they had not found a solution to combat the
problems. The problem is to discover what people do when they arrive on the site
and if they ever return. This information is invaluable to managers and carries a lot
of credibility. User tracking on the Internet therefore needs to mature and start to
provide useful economic and social information those marketers and specialists and
executives can use to align all the strategies of the corporation. The problem is that
ISP’s can include internal activities in their traffic or they can tamper with log files
while the electronic counters are susceptible to server and network congestion and
downtime. These facts would obviously affect Internet marketing and alignment of
strategies.
Aligning the IS strategy with the organizations goals is also appropriate for
those organizations in which there is a vision for items such as e-commerce. Ecommerce
is part of the actual choice any organization should have. This is where
the E-commerce Department can play a major role - their primary responsibility
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