Barriers to global electronic commerce: A cross-country study of Hong Kong and Finland

So far electronic commerce has primarily been limited to electronic business-to-business transactions and small, but quickly growing, consumer-oriented activities on the Internet, such as electronic advertisements mated with the traditional mail-order operations. What lies ahead in the future is a concept of true global electronic commerce (GEC), in which firms will exploit a virtual value chain to migrate much of their value-adding activities from the physical marketplace to the virtual marketplace. The capability for business concerns to be able to reach out to a global business community at a relatively small cost is very attractive and promises to transform international business. Despite this realization, it has become increasingly evident that the proliferation of GEC is dependent on resolution of a myriad of technical, organizational, economic, cultural, political, and legal issues. In this study, field studies of 10 companies in Hong Kong and Finland were conducted with an eye toward identifying the major barriers that have hindered or slowed down the wide acceptance of electronic commerce across borders. In addition to several country-specific barriers to GEC, resistance to change, lack of education about the potentials of GEC, and lack of flexible software were found to be the key inhibitors to the orderly acceptance and deployment of computer-mediated commerce at the global level.published_or_final_versio

Leveraging geographic and information technology scope for superior performance: an exploratory steely in international banking

Here we investigate the relationship between the use of geographic and information technology (IT) scope as complementary factors to affect the value of products, the cost of operations and the overall performance of firms. We introduce the IT/Geographic Scope Matrix (IGSM) as a framework with which to study and understand the relationship in order to better manage the firm. We develop expectations that the consistent use of either high or low levels of IT and geographic scope may result in better firm performance than inconsistent use; where high levels of one are matched with low levels of the other. We apply the IGSM in a study of eleven firms, all of which provide financial services, specifically international cash management and trade finance, to firms in Hong Kong. The results of our study suggest that the IGSM may be a useful tool for IS planning and research and have implications for the co-ordination of business and IT planning. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved