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 interorganizational 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 interand 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.