| The tremendous impact of inter-organizational information systems (IOS) on supply chain management has been becoming more and more visible with the fast growing business-to-business e-commerce phenomenon. This dramatic growth is stimulated and embraced by rapid development of Internet technologies, increasing IS management sophistication, and the spread of strategic alliances. Many case and survey studies have tried to investigate the various factors that will decide the success or failure of business-to-business e-commerce. Through an analysis of these studies, we find that there are two directions. The first direction follows the tradition of competence-based perspective by looking into firms' IS competence and the other is to investigate the relationships within which the focal firm is embedded. While both of these two streams of research provided many insights, an integration of these two streams seems to be more promising both at the theoretical and empirical levels. This dissertation is to investigate the IOS phenomenon in the supply chain by combining IS competence and supply chain relationships, which are based on competence and transaction costs views. Research framework addresses both antecedents and consequences of IOS use, including competence, relationship, inter-firm transaction costs, explicit coordination, and buyer benefits variables. Empirical data are collected through interviews and surveys. The research model is then tested by applying LISREL package. Major findings are: (1) institutional environment within which b-to-b e-commerce is established is critical to its success; (2) firms are not currently taking advantage of their IS function talents to tackle the b-to-b e-commerce hurdle; (3) the benefits of e-commerce will be manifested through the mediation of reduction of inter-firm transaction costs; and (4) in the Internet age, the inter-firm governance mechanism is moving toward the middle of market and hierarchy. |
