Abstract

Globalization has transformed companies to enterprises over the last 50 years. Computing and communication have also transformed production and service organizations over the past 50 years. While parallelism, error recovery, and conflict resolution have been addressed by human workers since the early days of industry, they have recently been transformed by computer-integrated functions. A major concern in the global market is agility. The agility of enterprises is considered an increasingly important factor of economic competitiveness. We view it from two perspectives: business and organizational agility, and operational and logistics agility. In the business and organizational perspective of agility, our research has developed an analytic method called distributed parallel integration evaluation model (DPIEM). Its purpose is organizing/reorganizing resources among distributed, networked organizations, based on the parallelism theory of computing and communication. In terms of operational and logistics agility in such distributed organizations, our research has suggested that the connection between the autonomy functions and agility requires significant functions of error detection and recovery (EDR), and conflict resolution (CR). The impact of both functions on the operational and logistics agility is analyzed and illustrated. The article concludes with several theoretical observations about the role of information technology (IT) in modern, distributed and networked enterprises. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.