E-Change: Charting a path towards sustainable e-strategies

This paper proposes that the E‐revolution constitutes a special case of disruptive innovation for organizations, demanding new responses by leaders, managers and change agents in successfully charting a course of change. The greatest challenges in embedding E‐technologies are not necessarily strategic or technical. They relate to people, structure and culture—that is, to the critical issues of implementation and business innovation. A typology of different kinds of E‐change strategies is developed, showing how different organizational forms and change processes will be necessary in different strategic contexts. The approach used successfully by one organization may be completely inappropriate for another. A change‐mapping schema is then introduced to illustrate how these E‐strategies and associated change processes may alter over time. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.