Organizing for e-business: the implementation of management principles in electronic commerce

This paper reviews some key structural and design dimensions of organizations and how they apply to electronic business and the virtual organization. The paper reviews the relevant literature on design of electronic commerce organizations. Although few studies have dealt with these issues, the paper highlights some research questions that emerge from the literature, and examines selected dimensions, such as formalization, departmentation, and inter-organizational relations. The paper concludes that electronic commerce organizations are faced primarily with design issues, so that conventional knowledge of structural dimensions is highly applicable to this new business phenomenon.