Digital Company and e-Management - From management to e-management

What is e-management, and is it still relevant today? It's worth asking why this concept seems to be somewhat unique to France, without receiving the same attention – across the Atlantic, or even in France's neighboring countries –. This is undoubtedly due to the different nature of Anglo-Saxon management methods. North American managers seem to have a legitimist attitude to adopting technological developments, which they seize upon and integrate into their practices more spontaneously and rationally. In contrast, French managers initially seemed more reserved about understanding the scale of the changes underway, even if their position has since changed, notably under the pressure of competition and globalization.

The concept of e-management first emerged in France in the early 2000s, in the work carried out by a team of researchers (Bellier Sandra, Isaac Henri, Josserand Emmanuel, Kalika Michel and Leroy Isabelle) at the Université Paris Dauphine, as part of the Observatoire de l'e-management, a joint project between Cegos and the university. University professor and founder of the DEA "e-management: concepts and methods", Michel Kalika published an article entitled "Le management est mort, vive le e-management" (Management is dead, long live e-management) in issue 129 of the Revue française de gestion on April 16, 2000. In the very first lines of this text, he declares: "All sectors, all professions, all corporate functions have been, are or will be turned upside down by the Internet", before giving the following definition of e-management: "E-management can be defined as the integration of the impacts and opportunities of new information and communication technologies into all management processes, i.e., finalization, organization, leadership and control". At the time, he gave e-business as its field of application (reflecting the preoccupations of the time), also raising the question of the organizational implications of this mutation, whether in terms of structure, human resources management or overall company operation.

Henri Isaac and Isabelle Leroy wrote in "Le e-management: vers l'entreprise numérique" that: "The emergence of the term e-management has raised many questions: it's a vague notion, a fashionable term, with no tangible reality. This skepticism is also fuelled by another criticism: the computerization of management is not a recent phenomenon, and the Internet is merely accelerating the computerization of companies. In other words, the new information technologies have no great impact on value-creation processes, let alone on the skills of individual employees. With this common-sense observation, they remind us that management results from the conjunction of four distinct processes (finalizing objectives, organizing, leading people, controlling)...