E-Business Governance: A Co-Evolutionary Approach to E-Business Strategy Formulation

e-Business evolution is generally presented as a highly dynamic process where organisations focus on business transformation and the creation of the agile extended enterprise. What is not well understood however is how organisations can plan for this process and whether standard business strategy formulation approaches can apply in such a dynamic environment. The research presented in this paper resulted from a longitudinal analysis of e-business governance and implementation involving eleven international organisations over a four-year period using multiple interviews and extensive secondary data collection. Three separate research models were used to analyse different stages of e-business growth and the results of this multi-stage analysis consolidated into a staged model of e-business governance. This model identifies three different orientations of the business during the transformation process as Integration, Differentiation and Virtualisation and associated with these three different strategic formulation approaches which will align with e-business governance. These together provide for a co-evolutionary approach to e-governance