Developing A Robust And Responsive E-society

E-business is a much hyped term for the relentless move towards conducting all business transactions online. Too often this is simply equated with the implementation of a Web site ranging from simple brochure ware to full-scale online operations. Working for e-business takes much more than this. It involves organisational change, carries with it legal and security implications and, perhaps most importantly, requires attitudinal and societal change. This Special Issue of Logistics Information Management presents selected papers from the annual We-B conference held in Perth, Western Australia, in November. The theme for the conference is e-society and focuses on the broader issues affecting the success of e-developments. The nine papers published in this Special Issue reflect this diversity and cover virtual organisations and the management of e-business and e-government change, e-business interactions with SMEs, older people and retail supply chains, and, security, copyright and jurisdiction issues. In the first paper of this Special Issue Love and Tellefsen apply a model of constituent market orientation to a taxonomy of virtual organisations and propose new models for decision making and modelling in virtual organisations. This work pulls two streams of work together across national boundaries building on Tellefsen’s empirical studies in Norway and the virtual organisation change model developed by a group of Australian researchers. The result is a much richer representation of ‘‘virtualness’’ identifying many of the real-world processes such as leadership, learning, cultural harmony and technological and managerial innovation that underpin successful e-business transformations. Following from this, Gardner and Ash present their framework for change management, again utilising cross-national studies from Norway and the UK in two different industries: oil and gas and banking. Their focus in this paper is on the dynamics of change and they use these two cases to illustrate this. The model they develop differentiates between intended strategies and emergent strategies and shows the interplay between these in a complex networked e-business environment. A key concept is the introduction of chaos and the need to embrace this within a change management model. This has implications for all the key stakeholders and for long-term e-business success. The final paper in this group presents the findings from a case study of e-government change. Burn and Robins apply an accepted model of e-business change developed by Guha et al. to a government environment. The case study examines the transition of a Legal Aid department from a traditional government bureaucracy to a more flexible e-government model involving multiple stakeholders. As with e-business, e-government requires major business process change and this paper examines this process in the context of this e-government initiative utilising the Internet to provide extended