An Approach On E-business Maturity Assessment For Traditional Enterprises

With the boom of information technology, enterprises are pushed into a globalcompetition based on Internet, and e-business has been a new platform and vital way ofsurviving for businesses, lots of new e-business enterprises have emerged recently, and moreand more traditional enterprises who have known the value of e-business have already beeninto the gate of e-business. However, lots of traditional enterprises are confused when theygot into e-business fields, it is how to recognize the maturity of e-business and to gain aneffective guidance for improving the maturity that make enterprises confused. The puzzle isnot only urgent for enterprises to solve, but also it is one of the newly emergent interests inthe Information Systems (i.e. IS) discipline. Researches in China’s academia concerned withe-business maturity are mainly focusing on the indicator system for evaluating, and purelyapplying the methods like fuzzy to get a maturity of e-business for a certain enterprise, butrarely concerns with the maturity models and methods for improvement the maturity ofe-business. Therefore, we attempt to develop a maturity model in our paper, which can beused to evaluate the maturity of e-business for traditional enterprises and can providerecommendations for improving the maturity, and we evaluate the developed model byimplementation methodologies.First, a review on conceptions, characteristics, classification of traditional enterprises,e-business, e-business maturity, and maturity models is made through a broad literature study.Moreover, we present a comparative review among the most cited studies on maturity modelsof e-business, and recognize the characteristics and demerits of the compared e-businessmaturity models.Second, a comparison is made between the literatures concerned with the designmethods of maturity models in the IS discipline, and five common steps are recognized.Based on the work, we design a development process for our E-business Maturity Model forTraditional Enterprises (TE-EMM), and propose a detailed methods for each design procedureon developing the model. Based on the design method, TE-EMM, of which maturity levels,dimensions, focus areas and dependencies are well elaborated, is developed, andrecommendations for improving e-business maturity are proposed based on the developedTE-EMM. An assessment tool which is performed in EXCEL is design for TE-EMM’simplementation. A case study on a well-known garment enterprise of Dalian is presented in the end, wegain the overall and each dimension’s maturity of the enterprise’s e-business, and we alsogive some suggestions on the improvement of the enterprise’s e-business maturity based onTE-EMM.