Value and impact of B2B electronic commerce on organizations: The effects of process, organization, and industry conditions

Modern information technology (IT), including the Internet and the World Wide Web (Web), has become one of the more critical business infrastructures of modern organizations. This shift of IT from being a mere productivity enhancement tool for individual user to being a process-support tool at the "extended enterprise" level has created several challenges for practitioners and researchers, alike. One of those challenges is the determination of the value of B2B e-commerce systems and the factors that enable realization of the full economic potential of B2B e-commerce. Since e-commerce systems differ from traditional IT systems in many ways, there is also a need to develop new concepts that help information systems (IS) researchers better evaluate e-commerce impact. Using B2B e-procurement as a special case of B2B e-commerce, I develop a framework to determine analytically and empirically the value of B2B systems and to verify the role of process and organizational attributes. The research propositions are derived based on prior studies on IT impact, but, we conceptualize IT value from a business process perspective. This framework is used to develop an analytical model of the effect of process and organizational variables on the value realized from B2B e-procurement systems. To test empirically the research hypotheses and to validate the analytical model, a cross-sectional survey of procurement managers is conducted and data is collected on e-procurement value and various process and organizational characteristics. Both the analytical results and the empirical findings support the importance of business processes in determining the value from e-commerce systems. In addition, this dissertation shows the need to include centralization as a key driver of e-commerce value. This research makes important theoretical and methodological contribution by conceptualizing and measuring process factors that affect IT impact on organizations. Based on this understanding, my future research can build a more general theory of IT support for enterprise business processes and process-technology fit.