Global e-corporation networks

These typically involve a network of virtual e-exchanges and ‘bricks-and-mortar’ services, whether those services are in-house or outsourced. This structure of functions and alliances is made of a combination of electronic and physical stages of the supply chain network, comprising some global and some local functions.

Centralized e-exchanges for logistics, supplies and customers may be housed anywhere. Suppliers, manufacturers and distributors may be in various countries, separately or together, depending on efficiencies of scale and cost. The result is a global e-network of suppliers, subcontractors, manufacturers, distributors, and buyers and sellers communicating in real time through cyberspace. This spreads efficiency throughout the chain, providing cost- effectiveness for all parties.

The Internet ‘has stamped a seismic, indelible imprint on counties’ industrial sectors, making communications between engineers and manufacturers faster and easier worldwide. Emails permit the almost immediate exchange of messages, drawings and documents; websites provide information on firms' capabilities and catalogues, purchase parts and materials. Potential clients can find specifications, download 3D models of components and locate almost any piece of information to help engineers with their designs.

However, there is still the need to manually complete the process of locating suppliers, sending out requests for quotations, then assessing each supplier's submission. Thus it takes a great deal of time and resources to find an appropriate source for even a simple part.

Internet marketplaces such as ManufactureLink represent the new breed of Internet-based е-business applications that are making huge strides in improving business communication efficiency and reducing the costs of B2B (business-to-business) transactions. These systems are designed to replicate traditional business methods, but within an online environment.

ADG Global Supply, based in Western Australia, is an example of a company that uses the Internet to streamline its global supply systems. The company provides all types of equipment for the mining, earthmoving and drilling industries and offers single parts or total procurement services anywhere in the world. It has regional offices throughout Australia and a global network of stocking and shipping locations.

Transnational networks

Over time, many firms have evolved through various multinational forms to take advantage of a horizontal organization to manage across national boundaries, thus retaining local flexibility' while achieving global integration. Decentralized horizontal structures involve linking foreign operations lo each other and to headquarters in a flexible way to take advantage of both local and central capabilities.

Online citizen engagement with policy processes can be responsible for ‘raising the quality of democratic engagement, enhancing government transparency and accountability’, and ‘strengthening civic capacities’ through dense and cross-cutting networks of interaction and mutual engagement. The use of social capital is characterized by the transformation of vertical forms of interaction to more horizontal forms of linkage and policy co-development.

However, the actual experiments in e-government and participatory online decision making have often proved disappointing. Traditional forms of government policy making and political organization are based on centralized and hierarchical structures.

Moreover, it is too easy for websites, ‘particularly those of the avowedly left, to start with a promising democratic, open access charter’, but to degenerate over time into ‘slanging matches between political factions’.

Many commercial organizations whose managers tend to treat the Internet as an ‘optional tool for more efficient communications rather than as a distinctive communicative space’. Yet it has the potential to reconstitute and reconfigure relationships between multiple users in ‘complex, horizontal and multidirectional’ interactions. There are many instances where networked and decentralized forms of economic, social and political organizations have flourished. Successful firms recognize that the Internet provides a collaborative space in which individuals emerge as producers, rather than just consumers, of policies, whether commercial or political.

Therefore the democratic potential of the Internet may lie, not simply in its geographical reach, networked connectivity or interactivity, but more generally in the ways that digital media technologies break down the traditional barrier between producer and consumer, or broadcaster and audience.

For example, blogs (commentaries), wikis (web applications that allow multiple authors to edit content), open news sites and community-based open – source journalism are forms of social software that are challenging established news media. With new protocols for content selection, authorship and diversity of sources, these sites are promoting a more open, participatory culture, blurring the lines between news providers and their audiences.

This is ‘open-ended, open-ended, networked and collaborative online engagement': a form of open-source democrat. \

These are all forms of the rising open-source software movement with potential for horizontal and decentralized forms of networked intelligence. They provide also a non-proprietorial information base for promotion of creativity, innovation and new forms of wealth creation’. Thus, the concept of e-government is not simply about electronic service delivery or information provision, but about active participation and using ICT (information and communication technologies) to transform the structures, operations – and most importantly – the culture fo governments. By implication, this applies to all organizational cultures.

Various names are given to organizational forms emerging to deal with global competition and logistics. However, the traditional hierarchical pyramids, subsidiaries and world headquarters, arc gradually evolving into more fluid forms to adapt to strategic and competitive imperatives. Information and communication technology is fuelling this change. In this new global network the location of a firm's headquarters is unimportant because it becomes a communications center where many of the Web’s threads intersect.

Choice of structure

In summary, two major variables in choosing the structure and design of an organization are the opportunities and need for globalization and localization. As firms progress from domestic to international – and perhaps later to multinational and then global – companies, their managers adapt the organizational structure to accommodate their relative strategic focus on globalization versus localization, choosing a global product structure, a geographic area structure, or perhaps a matrix form.

As the company becomes larger, more complex and more sophisticated in its approach to world markets (no matter which structural route it has taken), it may evolve into a transnational corporation whose strategy' is to create alliances, networks and horizontal designs.