Title: E-engineering: redefining the boundaries of the firm

Authors: B. Bowonder, P. Sudhakar, D. Wood

Addresses: Strategic Management of Technology, Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad - 500 082, India. GE India Technology Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore, 560 066, India. Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, M15 6PB, UK

Abstract: The boundaries of firms are changing rapidly because of the simultaneous onslaught of globalised competition and advances in IT. E-engineering is a method of combining logistics and non-logistics oriented value chains. E-engineering describes the process of disaggregating the value chains and delivering them in different ways using IT enabled services, exploiting the increasing range of options provided by IT advances along with the wide diffusion of internet messaging. Combining knowledge integration and remote service delivery opens up a variety of opportunities making it possible to design and operate many open organisational forms. Aircraft manufactures and IC chip manufactures have been able to reduce cycle time and integrate global operations easily.

Keywords: e-engineering; boundaries of firms; IT enabled services; global value chains; knowledge creation; virtual organisations.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITM.2002.001186

International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2002 Vol.1 No.1, pp.30-49

Published online: 01 Jul 2003 *

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