Making E-business pay: eight key drivers for operational success

How does a company achieve high levels of operational performance in e-business? It invests in e-business drivers, key factors to maximize e-business value, related to technology, business processes, and readiness of customers and suppliers to achieve operational excellence. At the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, University of Texas at Austin, we conducted a large-scale study to assess e-business value in small, medium, and large companies across the US and Europe. This study, sponsored by Dell Computer, identifies the critical links between e-business drivers, financial indicators, and operational excellence measures. The extensive survey of manufacturers, retailers, distributors, and wholesalers reveals that investing in e-business drivers pays off.     

Measuring dimensions of perceived e-business risks

The risks to e-business from breaches of security and privacy are well known. However, research has given very little attention to other important e-business risks. Using a socio-technical approach, in this study we survey a diverse sample of almost 200 participants to rate their perception of 16 e-business risks, compiled from the research and practitioner literature. Strategic risks, organizational risks and e-business policy risks emerged as the three underlying dimensions of e-business risk. In terms of the socio-technical model, strategic risks focus on the actor-structure component, and policy risks focus on the task-structure component. Organizational risks cover a wide spectrum of socio-technical components such as technology, actor-technology, technology structure and task-actor. The main contribution of this study is a multi dimensional scale of e-business risk perception. Practitioners can benefit by focusing their risk management efforts on the three dimensions of e-business risk, which are easier to manage than a long checklist of unrelated risks. Researchers benefit from a raised awareness on the importance of strategic and organizational risk factors in addition to policy risk factors for e-business risk management. A model that incorporates the three dimensions of e-business risks and shows theoretically based relationships with control mechanisms, trust, perceived uncertainty and profitability is proposed for testing in future research.     

Do (how) digital natives adopt a new technology differently than digital immigrants? A longitudinal study

Although the information systems (IS) literature has revealed a variety of mechanisms involved in technology adoption and postadoption use, the literature lacks insights about how individuals with different usage characteristics process the information related to new IS and how their belief judgments and use behavior unfold over time. This study fills this void in the literature by conceptualizing and testing a comprehensive model to investigate the impact of user orientation toward technology use by digital natives (DNs) and digital immigrants (DIs) on technology continuous use behavior. The effect of DNs and DIs is currently gaining the attention of researchers. This study investigated the postadoption and use behavior of these groups using a three-wave panel model and with decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB) as the initial adoption model. The longitudinal model is a unified framework that sheds light on four different mechanisms underlying postadoption phenomena: (1) the belief judgment evaluation processes suggested by the DTPB model, (2) sequential updating mechanism, (3) feedback mechanism, and (4) habit mechanism. Based on multigroup analysis, we show that a clear pattern of differences in effect exists between DNs and DIs with respect to the sequential belief updating mechanism and that these results are relatively stable over time.     

System on chip design service e-business value maximization through a novel MCDM framework

As the IC (integrated circuit) industry migrates to the System-on-Chip (SOC) era, the SOC design service industry is emerging. Meanwhile, in the past decade, the emergence of Internet has changed the high technology marketing approaches while e-commerce has already become one of the most efficient marketing channels. Thus, most leading SOC design service firms tried to leverage novel e-commerce business models to provide better services including online silicon intellectual property (SIP) sourcing, transactions, integration, etc. to assist customers in enhancing their innovation competences to shorten their time to market and thus, time to money. However, defining appropriate e-business models for commercializing new SIPs or SOC design services is not easy for both aspects of technology as well as business development. On one hand, from the aspect of technology, the technical site R&D or production managers are familiar with SOC technologies while do not really understand the needs of customers’ over the Internet. On the other hand, from the aspect of business development, the sales or marketing managers may be familiar with online customers’ needs, wants as well as demands while are unfamiliar to SOC technology developments. To overcome the above mentioned problems, an appropriate e-business model definition framework can overcome this cognitive gap and maximize the value-added of online SOC design services. In this paper, a novel analytic framework based on the concept of design service customers’ competence set expansions by leveraging high technology service firms’ capabilities and resources as well as novel multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, will be proposed. The framework being proposed can be leveraged by the design service firms to define an appropriate e-business model for possible SIP or design service businesses. Based on the proposed MCDM framework, an empirical study of an SIP commercialization e-business model definition inside an SIP Mall, an SIP e-commerce mechanism being operated by a SOC design service firm, will be provided for verifying the effectiveness of this novel analytic framework. The feasibility of the proposed framework in the real world can be verified by the empirical study. In the future, the novel MCDM framework can be applied to novel e-business model definitions in the SOC design service or other high technology industries.     

Measures for e-business value assessment

Companies are investing heavily to leverage the Internet and transform their traditional businesses into e-businesses. Senior managers are increasingly under pressure to justify e-business costs. Do these investments pay off? And if so, how can a company make sure they keep paying off? Managers in successful companies struggle to articulate where benefits come from, and those without success strive to find a way to turn things around and cash in on e-business initiatives. We previously discussed results from an extensive survey about how eight key drivers affect a company's e-business success. Researchers from the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin, conducted the survey to assess e-business value in small, medium, and large companies across the US and Europe. The study identified critical links between e-business drivers, operational excellence measures, and financial success measures. We describe these links in detail, showing that e-business initiatives improve operational excellence, which in turn improves financial performance     

How information and communication technology affect international trade: a comparative analysis of BRICS countries

ABSTRACT

This study analyzed how information and communication technology (ICT) influences international trade volume, and it undertook a comparative analysis of BRICS countries using panel data from the 2000 to 2016 period. The findings showed that (1) the effect of ICT was more positive on exports than imports, (2) the higher the ICT levels in the value chain were, the less effective they simultaneously were on both exports and imports, (3) the effect of ICT levels on trade increased over time, and (4) ICT improvement levels have more positive effects on trade in labor-intensive countries than on resources-intensives BRICS countries. To improve their export volume, BRICS countries would benefit from increasing their use of fixed-broadband and the internet.     

Innovation diffusion in global contexts: determinants of post-adoption digital transformation of European companies

Grounded in the diffusion of innovation theory and the technology–organization–environment framework, we develop an integrative model to study the determinants of post-adoption stages of innovation diffusion, using enterprise digital transformation as an example of technology-enabled innovations. We specify four innovation characteristics (relative advantage, compatibility, costs and security concern) and four contextual factors (technology competence, organization size, competitive pressure and partner readiness) as determinants of post-adoption usage, and postulate usage as an intermediate link to impact on firm performance. We test the proposed model using a dataset of 1415 companies from six European countries. We find that the innovation needs to be used extensively in value-chain activities before its impact can be realized. Among the innovation characteristics, we find that compatibility is the strongest driver, and security concern outweighs cost as a usage inhibitor. Among the contextual variables, technology competence, partner readiness and competitive pressure significantly drive e-business usage, and the structural inertia of large firms tends to slow down its penetration. Collectively, these results indicate that innovation diffusion can be better understood by including both innovation characteristics and contextual factors, whereas earlier literature has traditionally treated the two separately. Finally, we evaluate an international dimension among European countries and tease out important boundary conditions that would not have been evident in a single-country dataset. Our results show that careful attention must be paid to the economic and regulatory factors that may result in uneven innovation diffusion even among developed European countries.     

Core capabilities for practitioners in achieving e-business innovation

The rapid advance of information technology and its penetration into the core elements of the business model and organizational structures is enabling profound and significant organizational changes. In such a dynamic environment, firms must be able to continually evolve their capabilities to facilitate electronic business (e-business) innovation. Yet, current research pays little attention to the core capabilities that contribute to e-business innovation in general. This research seeks to identify the core capabilities that are necessary for achieving e-business innovation. We propose a tri-core model of e-business innovation adopted from Swanson (1994), which knits together three cores: business technology, the business model and the value network. We use this model initially to specify the functional areas of the capabilities. Based on data collected through an intensive literature review and an exploratory Delphi study, thirteen essential capabilities were considered as the keys to e-business innovation exploitation and exploration. Firms can facilitate their e-business solutions over time through the successful development of these capabilities. These findings provide great insights for practitioners and scholars alike to better understand the core capabilities for achieving e-business innovation. It can also help practitioners form a template of the requisite in-house management for identifying knowledge gaps and developing action plans.     

Intelligent e-business: from technology to value

E-business is the point where economic value creation and information technology come together. The Internet and the World Wide Web in particular have emerged as major driving forces in changing our economy. Business executives are now aware that information technology is a key strategic factor in industry, not just a tool to increase business-as-usual efficiency. This has happened over just a few years, but most of Internet business's socioeconomic impact likely lies ahead. These developments have led to the quick growth of scientific interest and activities related to e-business. Given these developments' pace and depth, big challenges and opportunities exist for applying intelligent systems technology and methodology. In fact, e-business has several distinct characteristics that make investigating the deployment of intelligent systems technology highly attractive.     

Using AHP to determine intangible priority factors for technology transfer adoption

Technology has characteristics of inducing changes under competitive environment due to its dynamic property of being modified and accelerated over time. In order to improve profitability, the evaluation of technology transfer adoption (TTA) is very important for determining the weights of TTA factors, the influence of the organizational factors (i.e., the measures of TTA dimension) such as chief executive officer (CEO)’ mind and capacity, commercialization, and technology licensing office (TLO)’s competence on the profitability of emerging technologies (ET), and the size of these organizational factors in suppler and buyer.This research investigates the important intangible priority factors for the transfer of technology through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and correlation analysis. The study is based on three phases: (1) Phase 1: selection of TTA factors and the measures of ET, TTA, and bargaining power (BP) dimension; (2) Phase 2: correlation analysis between the measures of ET and TTA dimension (evaluation of TTA dimension based on the measures of ET); (3) Phase 3: evaluation of TTA dimension based on the measures of BP dimension. The quantitative weights of criteria, TTA factors and sub-factors are provided and they indicate the order of priority and the degree of importance for TTA. The results are interpreted in terms of the ET and BP dimensions of measures that need to be considered in order to provide assistance at the time of decision-making on adoption of technology transfer by companies.     

Do e-business strategies matter? The antecedents and relationship with firm performance

Previous studies in e-business strategy focus on the issues of strategic positioning and its impact on firm performance. However, these studies do not address the antecedents to business strategies formulation and their impact on business performance or the role of business models in explaining e-business firm performance. This study applies Porter’s generic strategies to the e-business context. It also identifies business models that are applied to the e-business environment and environmental factors and then examines these factors influence on firm performance with survey data. This study finds that uncertainty has a negative impact on the choice of strategic position of e-business firms, whereas market turbulence positively affects the level of adoption of all the strategies. Among the strategic positions, marketing differentiation positively influences firm performance. The research methodology, test results, and implications are further discussed.     

Intelligent modeling of e-business maturity

E-business has a significant impact on managers and academics. Despite the rhetoric surrounding e-business strategy formulation mechanisms, which support reasoning of the effect of strategic change activities to the maturity of the e-business models, are still emerging. This paper describes an attempt to build and operate such a reasoning mechanism as a novel supplement to e-business strategy formulation exercises. This new approach proposes the utilization of the fuzzy causal characteristics of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) as the underlying methodology in order to generate a hierarchical and dynamic network of interconnected maturity indicators. By using FCMs, this research aims at simulating complex strategic models with imprecise relationships while quantifying the impact of strategic changes to the overall e-business efficiency. This research establishes generic adaptive domains – maps in order to implement the integration of hierarchical FCMs into e-business strategy formulation activities. Finally, this paper discusses experiments with the proposed mechanism and comments on its usability.     

e-Business process interleaving: Managerial and technological implications*

The emergence of Internet as the hub of e-business has made business process integration another important frontier of information management and technology. As a result, the management of inter-organizational business processes is now a major concern of corporate managers. We envision that the new and complex ways of interactions among business partners in a supply web will need to be managed effectively as the next generation of the Internet makes cross company workflow a reality. Consequently, business managers are confronted with new issues and new decisions in the strategic and operational aspects of process integration. To facilitate the understanding of these issues, we introduce a new paradigm of business computing referred to as E-business Process Interleaving, which emphasizes the complex and dynamic integration of e-business processes across company boundaries. In this paper, we outline various impacts of this new phenomenon on information management and technology and investigate the enabling technologies of e-business process interleaving. We believe that our work can help the development of the next generation of corporate information infrastructure that enables greater degree of e-business process integration.This research was partly supported by CITM grants including the DoD contract (2000–2001), N00244-00-C0108, and by the State of California NGI Program.     

Competence Models and the Maintenance Problem

Case-based reasoning (CBR) systems solve problems by retrieving and adapting the solutions to similar problems that have been stored previously as a case base of individual problem solving episodes or cases. The maintenance problem refers to the problem of how to optimize the performance of a CBR system during its operational lifetime. It can have a significant impact on all the knowledge sources associated with a system (the case base, the similarity knowledge, the adaptation knowledge, etc.), and over time, any one, or more, of these knowledge sources may need to be adapted to better fit the current problem-solving environment. For example, many maintenance solutions focus on the maintenance of case knowledge by adding, deleting, or editing cases. This has lead to a renewed interest in the issue of case competence, since many maintenance solutions must ensure that system competence is not adversely affected by the maintenance process. In fact, we argue that ultimately any generic maintenance solution must explicitly incorporate competence factors into its maintenance policies. For this reason, in our work we have focused on developing explanatory and predictive models of case competence that can provide a sound foundation for future maintenance solutions. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of this research, and we show how these models have been used to develop a number of innovative and successful maintenance solutions to a variety of different maintenance problems.     

Routinisation of B2B E-commerce by small firms: A process perspective

Prior research on e-business based on the TOE framework and the factor based variance approach have yielded mixed results in that differences exist in terms of the identified technology, organisation and environmental factors and their influence at different steps of the routinisation trajectory. In this research we probe deeper into the routinisation phenomenon and investigate the process in a bid to understand ??when?? and ??why?? certain TOE factors become crucial determinants at different stages of the routinisation process. The context of our study is integration of B2B e-markets by four small firms. Our findings from interpretive case studies indicate that changes in organisational characteristic (such as IT infrastructure), environmental characteristics (such as e-business usage in the industry), and perceptions of e-business (risk and benefit) over time influenced movement along the routinisation trajectory. There is evidence that in high risk e-business, the ability to conduct trials with controlled risk is a crucial determinant of progression from initial to continued usage. Also, contrary to the independent effects of the organisation, environment and technology characteristics assumed in prior research, we found that it is the interaction effect of the three factors that determined initial attitude, initial usage and continued usage. Based on our findings we develop a process model of e-business routinisation and discuss the theoretical and practical implications.     

Analysis and modeling of individual competencies: toward better management of human resources

A general approach is presented for the development of competence management information systems to enable competence management at all business control levels (i.e., strategic, tactical, and operational). Based on a state of the art review of competence definitions, a model named competence, resource, aspect, and individual (CRAI) for human resource competence is presented. For the sake of computerization, the CRAI model is fully defined using the set theory. It structures and formalizes the concept of competence and provides guidelines for its deployment in businesses when building a company's specific competence information system. Furthermore, the CRAI model is also analyzed on a number of queries frequently dealt with in competence management. To make them independent of any specific technology, these queries have also been formalized using the set theory. Finally, an extract of a full-scale industrial case study, on which the CRAI model has been tested, illustrates concepts discussed in the paper.     

Electronic business adoption by European firms: a cross-country assessment of the facilitators and inhibitors

In this study, we developed a conceptual model for studying the adoption of electronic business (e-business or EB) at the firm level, incorporating six adoption facilitators and inhibitors, based on the technology–organization–environment theoretical framework. Survey data from 3100 businesses and 7500 consumers in eight European countries were used to test the proposed adoption model. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis to assess the reliability and validity of constructs. To examine whether adoption patterns differ across different e-business environments, we divided the full sample into high EB-intensity and low EB-intensity countries. After controlling for variations of industry and country effects, the fitted logit models demonstrated four findings: (1) Technology competence, firm scope and size, consumer readiness, and competitive pressure are significant adoption drivers, while lack of trading partner readiness is a significant adoption inhibitor. (2) As EB-intensity increases, two environmental factors – consumer readiness and lack of trading partner readiness – become less important, while competitive pressure remains significant. (3) In high EB-intensity countries, e-business is no longer a phenomenon dominated by large firms; as more and more firms engage in e-business, network effect works to the advantage of small firms. (4) Firms are more cautious in adopting e-business in high EB-intensity countries – it seems to suggest that the more informed firms are less aggressive in adopting e-business, a somehow surprising result. Explanations and implications are offered.     

An Overview of Standards and Related Technology in Web Services

The Internet is revolutionizing business by providing an affordable and efficient way to link companies with their partners as well as customers. Nevertheless, there are problems that degrade the profitability of the Internet: closed markets that cannot use each other's services; incompatible applications and frameworks that cannot interoperate or built upon each other; difficulties in exchanging business data. Web Services is a new paradigm for e-business that is expected to change the way business applications are developed and interoperate. A Web Service is a self-describing, self-contained, modular application accessible over the web. It exposes an XML interface, it is registered and can be located through a Web Service registry. Finally, it communicates with other services using XML messages over standard Web protocols. This paper presents the Web Service model and gives an overview of existing standards. It then sketches the Web Service life-cycle, discusses related technical challenges and how they are addressed by current standards, commercial products and research efforts. Finally it gives some concluding remarks regarding the state of the art of Web Services.     

A hybrid performance measure system for e-business investments in high-tech manufacturing: An empirical study

For over a decade, empirical studies on the organizational performance of IT investment have been far from conclusive, and one major issue that has led to an ongoing debate is whether inadequate methods are applied in measuring IT values. Traditional measures have primarily been financial: return on investment and return on sales. Researchers have suggested a need to use other measures, although there has been little agreement on which precisely to use. Moreover, empirical studies showed limitations in using only a single organization-level measure, whereas a more complete assessment could involve measures from several levels. In addition, benefits from IT investments are normally realized over time. This study used an integrative assessment framework with a three-level structure of organizational hierarchy: corporate strategies, manufacturing decisions, and operational activities, along with a time-lag effect. Different levels of performance measures were examined over different time periods. The framework was verified by survey data. Our results indicated that time tag had positive impact on the performance measures of corporate strategies and that they were significantly correlated with operational activities.     

运动会电子商务工程方案研究

本文描述了全国第九届运动会电子商务工程的总体功能，着重介绍了基于安全性、事务处理、代码重用和系统备份等方面采用的解决方案。同时，还介绍了IBM Websphere对该方案的成功实现提供的技术支持。