DISMANTLING THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONTEXT - THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS IN THE ORGANIZATIONAL ADOPTION OF OPEN STANDARD-BASED INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Open standard-based inter-organizational information systems play a critical role in today´s organizations and their relationships with business partners. However, theoretical understanding of organizational adoption of such systems in existing research is limited. Prior studies highlight the role of the external business environment in influncing organizational adoption of such systems, but lack focus on the various environmental context characteristics influncing organizational adoption decisions. This study conducts a structured analysis of scientific literature on factors of the organizational, technological, and environmental contexts that are able to influnce the organizational adoption of open standard-based inter-organizational information systems. Using the results of the literature analysis, this study focuses on the critical role of the business environment in influncing organizational adoption of such systems and derives a typology of environmental context characteristics exhibiting inherently differing types of business environment related influnce on organizational adoption decisions. The derived typology leads to a better theoretical understanding of organizational adoption of such systems and provides practitioners with a structured view on the external forces operating in the business environment of their organization. Finally, the study discusses important implications for future research in this context as well as for decision makers considering the adoption of particular systems

Convincing Business Partners to Adopt – Results from a Field-Experimental Setting on Organizational IOS Adoption

Organizations striving to compete in today’s harsh economic environment are forced to continuously innovate to retain competitiveness over time. The use of inter-organizational systems (IOS) is one way for organizations to gain competitive advantage. This paper attempts to investigate the adoption of IOS by means of a controlled field-experiment on organizational level. Relevant scientific literature on this topic largely agrees that two main factors of influence – circumstantial information, and institutional pressure – are assumed to have a strong influence on adoption intention of organizations. By conducting a field experiment across 504 business partners of a larger German organization, we find evidence for the relationship between institutional pressure and IOS adoption, while no support is found for the relation between circumstantial information and IOS adoption

Micro-Firms Need to be Addressed Differently – an Empirical Investigation of IOS Adoption Among SMEs

Inter-organizational information systems (IOS) play a critical role in today’s organizations and their relationships with business partners. While large organizations began utilizing such systems since their dawn in the 1970’s, SMEs have largely been reluctant to adopt and use these technologies. Given their relative commonness among enterprises, SMEs and micro-firms are particularly well suited to provide the critical mass of adopters needed to exploit network externalities exhibited by IOS. However, studies on adoption of IOS featuring micro-firms have remained scarce. Hence, a special focus on adoption decisions in micro-firms can be of great value to advance the understanding of IOS adoption. A survey is conducted on the influence of inhibitors on adoption of IOS for electronic invoice exchange among German SMEs and micro-firms. Several inhibitors are identified from extant literature restraining SMEs from adopting. In particular, results show that reasons restraining micro-firms are significantly different from reasons restraining larger SMEs

Who Needs to be Informed? – Empirical Results From a Field Experiment on The Adoption of IOIS Among SMEs

Inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) play a critical role in today’s organizations and their relationships with business partners. While large organizations already began utilizing IOIS at the outset, small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) have subsequently been reluctant to adopt and use IOIS. As such systems are subject to high network effects, a firm thus has to reach out especially to its SME partners to achieve a critical mass of adopters among them. Prior research agrees that the provision of support in terms of circumstantial information and expertise can influence organizational adoption decisions. However, research in this direction has remained inconclusive. This study conducts a controlled field experiment at the organizational level to investigate the provision of support as a non-coercive persuasion strategy to foster the adoption of IOIS among 203 SME business partners of a large German organization. A cluster analysis is further conducted to identify distinct clusters of IOIS adopters showing significantly different adoption rates that result from informing them as a strategy. The results first offer evidence for the importance of informing SMEs as a viable strategy to foster IOIS adoption among them. Furthermore, the results provide empirical evidence for the presence of particular arrangements of characteristics describing the strategy and structure of analyzed organizations that ultimately interact with the effect of the provision of support as a persuasion strategy

Organizational Resistance to E-Invoicing: Results from an Empirical Investigation among SMEs

Part 4: Adoption and Service EvaluationInternational audienceIn order to improve the governmental efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, an important part of e-government is the digitalization of documents and the processing of these documents through electronic channels. Such a critical document in business process chains is the invoice, which is why the European Commission strives to increase the adoption and diffusion of electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) among public and private sector organizations. However, the adoption rate among businesses is still low and especially very small firms resist using e-invoicing.By collecting quantitative and qualitative survey data of 416 German companies resisting the usage of e-invoicing, we confirm and explore factors affecting the resistant behavior towards the electronic exchange of invoices and elaborate on differences in those factors with organizational size. In particular among micro firms, the lack of knowledge regarding the theme and procedure of e-invoicing represents the relatively most important influencing factor, while comparatively larger firms also expect huge change management efforts