Evaluating E-Business Leadership and its Links to Firm Performance

Electronic business (e-business) has been popularly lauded as “new economy.” As a result, firms are prompted to invest heavily in e-business related activities such as supplier/procurement and online exchanges. Whether the investments have actually paid off for the firms remain largely unknown. Using the data on the top 100 e-business leaders compiled by InternetWeek, the leaders are compared with their comparable counterparts in terms of profitability and cost in both the short-run and long-run. It is found that while the leaders have superior performance based on most of the profitability measurements, such superiority is not observed when cost measurements are used. Based on the findings, managerial implications are offered accordingly.

Measurements in E-Business

This chapter is designed to answer two fundamental questions related to research on electronic surveys and measures. First, what are some of the major measures specifically related to e-business? Second, what makes Internet research methods different from off-line research methods? The chapter partly delineates what makes Internet research methods distinctive through its discussion and separation of the most common measures. This separation not only provides the framework for the chapter, but it distinguishes research for understanding the evolving e-consumer from measures related to the new paradigm for e-business strategy. In total, 17 different measures are discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of emerging issues in e-business metrics, and possibilities for future research.

How Can Internet Service Providers Tap into the Potentially -Lucrative Small Business Market?

Small businesses need Internet service to be competitive, and their spending on IT activities continues to grow. How can Internet Service Providers tap into this potentially lucrative market? This study attempts to identify Internet service features that are important to small businesses. Specifically, it used a survey method to explore the relationships between the importance of various features and organizational characteristics of small businesses, for example, size and type of business. The results show that the size of business affects the perceived importance placed on certain features, while the type of business does not. Implication of this finding for packaging Internet service is discussed.

E-Business Technologies in E-Market Literature

E-business processes are implemented through existing, as well as novel technologies. This book chapter focuses on the field of electronic markets (e-markets), and studies the technologies and solutions that are applied and proposed in this field. In particular, the chapter reviews e-market literature in order to identify which are the technological trends that have appeared in the e-markets field during the last decade. A conceptual model that allows for the classification of e-market research literature according to a number of technical topics is first introduced. Then, e-market literature is reviewed, and the technologies that seem to be attracting more research attention are identified. Representative contributions are discussed, and directions for future research are indicated. The overall aim of this chapter is to provide a blueprint of the literature related to e-business technologies for e-markets

Best Practice in Leveraging E-Business Technologies to Achieve Business Agility

This chapter explains the best practice in implementing e-business Technologies to achieve business cost reduction and business agility. Many companies started to realize that gaining competitive advantage is no longer feasible by only managing their own organizations; it also requires getting involved in the management of all upstream supply organizations as well as the downstream network. E-business technologies present huge opportunities that are already being tapped by several companies and supply chains. Although the benefits of implementing e-business technologies are clear, enterprises struggle in integrating e-business technologies into supply- chain operations. The author illustrates the strategic and operational impact of e-business technologies on supply chains and explains the performance benefits and challenges firms should expect in implementing these technologies. Also, the author provides the best-practice framework in leveraging e-business applications to support process improvements in order to eliminate nonvalue- added activities and provide real-time visibility and velocity for the supply chain. Finally, this chapter presents the future trends of using e-business in transformation programs.

Best Practice in Company Standardization

This article describes a best practice model for standardization within companies, based on a process approach to the development of company standards. Per process, a best practice is developed based on an investigation within six multinational companies and a review of literature, if any. The findings are benchmarked against experiences in three comparable fields: IT management, quality management, and knowledge management. Though the number of company standards exceeds by far the number of external standards, they have been neglected in standardization research. The authors hope that standards practitioners will benefit from their study and that it will stimulate researchers to pay more attention to this topic.

Conflicts, Compromises, and Political Decisions

This article describes the architecture development process in an international ICT company, which is building a comprehensive e-business system for its customers. The implementation includes the integration of data and legacy systems from independent business units and the construction of a uniform Web-based customer interface. We followed the early process of architecture analysis and definition over a year. The research focuses on the creation of e-business architecture and observes that instead of guided by a prescribed method, the architecture emerges through somewhat non-deliberate actions obliged by the situation and its constraints, conflicts, compromises, and political decisions. The interview-based qualitative data is analyzed using grounded theory and a coherent story explaining the situation and its forces is extracted. Conclusions are drawn from the observations and possibilities and weaknesses of the support that UML and RUP provide for the process are pointed out.

Process-Oriented Assessment of Web Services

Though Web services offer unique opportunities for the design of new business processes, the assessment of the potential impact of Web services is often reduced to technical aspects. This paper proposes a four-phase methodology which facilitates the evaluation of the potential use of Web services in e-business systems both from a technical and from a strategic viewpoint. It is based on business process models, which are used to frame the adoption of Web services and to assess their impact on existing business processes. The application of this methodology is described using a procurement scenario.

Business Networking

The rapid evolution of information and communication technologies, the changing client’s demands, and market conditions impelled enterprises to adapt their way of undertaking business, from traditional practices to e-business, and to participate in new forms of collaboration, such as networked organizations. In this context, standards, frameworks, technologies, and infrastructures supporting collaborative business, in a networked environment, become key factors in achieving environments with a desired high level of collaboration and inter- and intra-organization business processes alignment. The aim of this chapter is to underline the main issues, trends, and opportunities related to business integration from a technological perspective, analyzing and discussing the most relevant (existing and still under development) business integration reference models, frameworks, standards, technologies, and supporting infrastructures, and to briefly present relevant research projects in the area of business networking. A special emphasis is made on frameworks such as ebXML and RosettaNet, and the importance of papiNet, BPLE4WS, and freebXML is underlined. Challenges regarding self-forming networked organizations are also advanced.

E-Business Risk Management in Firms

In order to understand the different types of e-business risks, this chapter uses a framework focusing on five dimensions of e-businesses. This chapter examines e-business risk management in a broader context by integrating various functions within firms. Primary consideration is given to characteristics of the integrated supply chain functionalities of a firm and their associations with information technology (IT), business models of firms, business processes that have become important to e-business, services that have been interlocked into e-business, the relative importance of partnerships, trust, and the necessity of adaptation in managing the supply chain in order to attain competitive advantage. The purpose of this chapter is to understand how to identify and manage various online risks.