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The article informs that organizational change is ubiquitous and continuous process. It permeates organizational processes and life. Many organizations invest significant sums of resources into external consulting. Some organizations even embrace change and attempt to integrate it into their strategic planning. In the MIS academic arena, the most prevalent research topic associated with change over the past decade has focused on a change methodology, namely, business process reengineering (BPR). In the management academic arena, the focus has been on change management as a research construct. MIS research on change tends to be oriented toward applied research, while management research tends to be oriented more toward conceptual research. Quality research, regardless of orientation, must adhere to rigorous academic standards, while being grounded in business practice. Beginning around 1990, BPR came onto the business scene as the savior of under performing organizations. Early advocates of BPR touted it as the next revolution in obtaining breakthrough performance via process improvement and process change.

The failure of dot-coms is a staggering 75% in the first two years. Many of these failures were small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). One of the most commonly cited reasons for failure has been lack of a workable strategic business model to guide e-commerce (electronic commerce) efforts. We began this study because we wanted to explore if successful e-commerce SMEs use a guiding strategic process model, and if they do, ask them to articulate the model components. We chose a qualitative research method to obtain a rich description of the e-commerce process. The interview pool consisted of 15 interviews with established SME e-commerce entrepreneurs. From deep analysis of the data, a set of e-commerce process components and interrelationships between those components emerged from the data. We then synthesized (from the rich description) a model of the e-commerce process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]