I have affectionately referredto organization politics as job security through insecurity. The reason for that is the “back room” politics that occur in regard to what a single person said as opposed to what the business needs to accomplish. Believe it or not, e-commerce is still a young field. Technologies are still evolving and need to be integrated with past practices.

Organizational politics hurt an organization when they do not deploy the correct resources to meet changing business requirements. The reason for organizational politics hurting the organization is due to the clash of new technology and old methodology. Information technology is change and rapid application deployment (RAD) is becoming the standard. Old methodology means not implementing a new technology until it is completely modified for the organization’s business requirements.

With old methodology an application may take years to roll-out to the user community and customers. The way technology is evolving, old methodology means your are presenting an outdated product to the final users. Waste of capital resources? Organizational politics will waste many business resources because brainstorming is only conducted with a few select individuals and many times they are not the experts on emerging technology.

We see many smaller organizations developing winning technologies in regard to e-commerce. Small organizations can not afford the time and resources to engage in organizational politics. Small organizations can also not afford the costs of a hiring mistake. Place a visionary in charge of your e-commerce section and watch it take off or use old methodology and play catch-up to the rest of your industry segment. Also, strive for RAD because whether you deploy the application today or in two years you are still paying for licensing and support.

Thoughts?

Mikhail Kniaziewicz, MIS

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