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E-business benefit both large and small businesses. However, the aggregate cost of successful online trading, including initial and recurring costs, continues to pose a great challenge to micro-enterprises. For these willing businesses, the result is a mere web presence and for some, the thought of trading online is a no-go area. Using a multi-case study qualitative approach, this study adopts the technology-organisation-environment theoretical lens to explore empirically the strategies used by e-retail microbusinesses to potentially advance their e-business adoption. The findings revealed the actual cost of adoption, the technology-organisation-environment strategies in use to lower the cost barrier, and how the pursuit of the cost barrier simultaneously lowers some adoption barriers outside the cost factors. The study also highlighted the intrinsic idiosyncratic nature of small firms’ ecosystems, and the fact that government resources and services provided by companies, both private and public, could effectively reduce the costs associated with e-business adoption.

Erratum to: K.V. Andersen et al. (Eds.) Seeking Success in E-Business DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35692-1

Erratum to: L.M. Camarinha-Matos et al. (Eds.) E-Business and Virtual Enterprises DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35399-9

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed October 11, 2013).

With electronic business (eBusiness) becoming ubiquitous, the traditional ways of doing commerce need to be changed or completely replaced to support the end users effectively in performing their business. This includes especially the representation of business relationships with an electronic format to allow for automated processing of the respective parts of e.g. contractual obligations. One prominent representation tool are Service Level Agreements. Conceptually established as paper representation to describe parts of contracts of telecom operators, SLAs have become a research topic in the ICT domain now since several years.

In the current competitive scenario, where business relationships are fundamental in building successful business models and inter/intra organizational business processes are progressively digitalized, an end-to-end methodology is required that is capable of guiding business networks through the Internetworked Enterprise (IE) paradigm: a new and innovative organizational model able to leverage Internet technologies to perform real-time coordination of intra and inter-firm activities, to create value by offering innovative and personalized products/services and reduce transaction costs. This chapter presents the TEKNE project Methodology of change that guides business networks, by means of a modular and flexible approach, towards the IE techno-organizational paradigm, taking into account the competitive environment of the network and how this environment influences its strategic, organizational and technological levels. Contingency, the business model, enterprise architecture and performance metrics are the key concepts that form the cornerstone of this methodological framework.

Service quality can be seen as one of the main determinants of customer satisfaction, which in turn influences purchase intentions (Spreng and Mckoy, 1996; DeRuyter et al., 1997; Bloemer et al., 1998). This is of main interest, particularly in the banking sector, where the highly competitive market has caused the banking system to undergone drastic changes. Institutional changes, creation of extensive product/service portfolios, major changes in the ownership status, heavy use of modern technology and globalization of the banks activities are only some examples of these changes identified in the banking sector (Gortsos, 1998). Due to this heightened competition, bank service quality rises as an important factor that will affect the relevant market shares and profitability in the banking sector (Anderson et al., 1994; Hallowell, 1996; Caruana and Pitt, 1997).

Emerging technology is one of the key factors that drive the business world to faster adaptation, reaction and shorter communication path. Building upon such technologies, business communities emerge, geared toward high flexibility in their offerings and collaboration: business-to-customer and business-to-business collaborations. Adapting to the market requirements, companies must address several technical challenges that arise from the main requirements of the system they have to introduce: a high degree of flexibility, heterogeneous system collaboration and security of the transferred data.

This study has the purpose to specify the main changes determined by e-business in the field of financial audit. The importance that e-businesses have gained in the last years and also its potential have convinced many companies to embrace this method when completing their activity totally or partially. Under the circumstances the auditor’s mission becomes more and more complex, being forced to handle equally both the specific verifications for financial activity and the information systems used, involving in this case the use of various and complex technologies. This study presents the audit’s phases and their approach in an e-businesses environment.

The development of e-commerce in China has been of interest to many throughout both the scholarly and business communities. Certainly, a nation which claims one of the largest populations of Internet users, together with a dominant role in the global economy, would be expected to be a major player in e-commerce. However, because of the impacts of various variables, constraints, as well as the makeup of the population and its Internet users, e-commerce in China has evolved differently, and has unique characteristics compared with e-commerce from other nations and markets. An analysis of the current state of e-commerce in China, followed by an analysis of the factors which impact upon China’s e-commerce, provide insight into its development of electronic business. The role of culture, which is another key factor, is also discussed. From here, a look to future trends and directions is provided.

Web Services has become the infrastructure to connect business applications over the Internet. Under the current Web Services, however, stakeholder systems must follow the predefined rules for a particular business service including those about business protocols to send/receive messages and about system operation. Only the systems built strictly to follow the predefined rules can participate in the concerning service. This is insufficient when considering future eBusiness systems. More flexible mechanism is desired where freely built and autonomously running systems can exchange business messages without pre-agreed strict rules. We call it Autonomous Web Services (AWS) and proposed the framework called Dynamic Model Harmonization (DMH) with its algorithm, which dynamically adjusts different business process models between systems [1]. In this paper, we propose middleware technology that realizes AWS based on the DMH. The proposal includes the mechanism and specification to drive an application by a dynamically harmonized business process model, as well as the DMH algorithm extended in line with the proposed mechanism. In addition, the way to control very long transactions often appear in AWS environment is proposed, and messaging infrastructure for AWS is discussed based on the prototype implementation.

Web Services and related open standard technologies are key technologies for system infrastructure in industry systems and local government systems. There are many projects that have adopted these technologies in the local government systems and also in B2B systems in various industries. We found that one of the key requirements to promote these standards in industries is pull messaging for client/server systems, since many small and medium enterprises can’t afford server systems. To achieve this, we have standardized Pull messaging specification as a part of ebXML (Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language) Messaging Services Specification Version3.0, with inputs of industries requirements. We also have developed Conformance test tool and additional test assertions for ebMS3.0 to promote interoperable implementation for ebMS3.0, and executed interoperability test. In this experience, we have found interoperability issues in open source. We will investigate this issue further, and continue giving feedbacks to implementations and prototype. We believe this experience regarding Pull messaging technology will be valuable for local government systems in the future, when it is going to expand its infrastructure to connect with medium and small entities.

Due to recent developments of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and turbulent market conditions, businesses have migrated from traditional practices to ebusiness, which represents an enabler for interoperability in a collaborative networked environment (CNE), e.g., (Chituc, Toscano, Azevedo, 2007a). Although active research is pursued in the area of interoperability in a CNE and on the emergence of collaborative business frameworks and standards, few studies aiming at comparing them are available. The objective of this article is to present an analytical method for collaborative business frameworks comparison, which may also be used by decision makers (DMs) in the framework selection process. The rest of the article is organized as follows: the next section presents four relevant collaborative business frameworks. An analytical method for collaborative business frameworks comparison is introduced in section three. Then, the comparison results are discussed.

The globalization of the business markets brought new opportunities for business and business collaborations. Discovering the most suitable partners will give any company an advantage on its business. However, how can different enterprises, spread worldwide, overcome geographical and cultural differences, find each other and initiate business transactions? The Internet can now connect virtually every place on the globe therefore the challenge is to provide a framework that would be widely accepted throughout all business areas. Initially, numerous organizations decided to develop new frameworks to connected their businesses and allow an electronic base for their networks. The most successful, at a point, was Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) which had a number of problems. From the need for a private network and its high implementation costs to the fact that it was not horizontally used as the common framework throughout companies around the world, EDI had disadvantages that kept it from a wider implementation (Mertz, 2001). With the appearance of XML, during the 1990s, the technology rapidly was adopted in various areas due to its high simplicity, flexibility, extensibility and ubiquity (R. Glushko & J. Tenenbaum & B. Meltzer, 2007). The Organization for Advancement for Information Standards (OASIS) a non-profit organization that develops, encourages and supports information standards and the United Nations body for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) decided to join forces and create a new framework for electronic business using the general-purpose extensible Markup Language: ebXML. Apart from the

E-business is one of the driving factors for the growth of the worldwide economy. But in parallel to the upsurge of the digital trade the cyberspace became also a main attraction for criminals. Today main parts of the Internet are still outside of traditional national legislation and law enforcement. Security is therefore a task that can not be delegated to the government only. Each party in an E-business operation has to care about the threats and the effective countermeasures. This paper introduces in the theme of online security and presents at the end a technical system that helps to defeat many of the actually most dangerous threats to a trusted E-business world.

This paper uses the Niche concept of Ecology to analyze the role and functions of e-business in network. It discusses the network niche of e-business enterprises in the aspects of network function, network information resources, network technology resources and network customer resources.

Recent advances in Internet and e-commerce have led industry to reengineer their organizational structures and value chains. One of the most prominent trends in this change is to conduct work and operation in the distributed or virtual environments. A new kind of business model, termed as value-net, is emerging. In this paper, the business and system mode from the value-net system is studied and proposed. The feature of this business model suitable for Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) is analyzed on the basis of value-net. The ecosystems (ecology system) model based on value-net is presented for the M-Commerce with systematic structure, collaborate mode and working mechanism. A modified value-net based ecosystem for M-Commerce operators is proposed in this paper with practical case analysis.

The combination of the electronic business and the exhibition industry has become an inevitable trend of the development of the exhibition industry. Through the efforts of many years, China Import & Export Fair has built a solid basic hardware platform for electronic business, hence made the exhibition management and electronic service e-enabled and web-enabled, then established the outward communication service systems, and built up an OA platform for foreign trade center. This paper provides a demonstration research analysis, and proposes a general model for the framework of electronic business in the exhibition industry.

Value chain is a basic method and framework to understand enterprise behavior and guide competition conduct. In the B2B E-business, traditional value chain changes greatly under the influence of information technology. So, in the paper, B2B E-business’s influence on traditional value chain was analyzed, and similarities and differences between physics value chain and virtual value chain are compared. The relationship of participate partners in the transfer process of virtual value chain was investigated using collaboration-deal model. At the base of that, the model of enterprise value network based on value chain integration and transfer process was established. Finally, IPR-PN model based on Petri network was established, which achieved the simulation of value chain transfer.

By analyzing the economy and technology background of appearance of tourism e-business, the paper describe the concept of tourism e-business and it’s operation mode in order to master this modern alternative deeply and all-round. The author emphasizes on the discussion of the inter-promotion and inter-development relationship between e-business and tourism economy, meanwhile forecasts the future of Chinese tourism e-business based on the analysis of difficult position we are facing now in tourism e-business. Combining with successful cases, suggestions on the development of tourism e-business are put forward.

Based on the value-oriented ontology approach, we present a simulation analysis with the e3-value software, and study the Witkey business model with structural analysis modeling method. The feasibility analysis on Witkey business model has been proved theoretically through the adjustment and estimate of parameters. Finally, the paper concludes with practical recommendations for business model innovation.

E-business is not a new topic, and many authors made many researches on this topic, such as the relationship between e-business and competitiveness, the advantages of e-business, e-business and knowledge management, e-business and management innovation, and so on. However, knowledge innovation in e-business enterprises is an ignored field. In fact, different kinds of companies at present considered knowledge innovation as the key factor for getting sustainable competitive advantage, no exception of e-business enterprises. Therefore, this paper chose knowledge innovation in e-business as its topic, and analyzed the relationship between e-business and knowledge innovation, and then explored the impact of knowledge innovation on e-business. In the end, it tried to analyze the knowledge innovation in e-business, including product and service innovation, technology innovation, and management innovation. These elements were then further decomposed.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is a source of competitive advantage in organizations especially for those organizations that supply chain (SC) is the core of their business or is tightly coupled with their core business. Traditionally organizations use re-engineering practices and organizational enhancement programs in order to increase their competitive advantage through optimizing their supply chain management. With advancement of technologies organizations begun to fabricate processes and employ more advanced communication technologies and technological tools -such as E-Marketplaces (EM) and RFID tags- with the goal of increasing the quality of their SC. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the concept of quality in SC, and application of B2B EMs for enhancing the quality of their supply chain. Moreover the adoption process and critical factors affecting the success of EM adoption in SC is explored in this study.

Although the hype surrounding the promise of electronic commerce seems all pervasive currently, there is an absence of research on automobile eCommerce, especially in developing countries, which covers wide-ranging issues beyond contextual imperatives. This paper tries to fill in the gap, by analyzing the impacts of eCommerce on automobile industry in China, and the factors of eCommerce adoption and development of automobile industry in China from internal, external and contextual perspectives, after describing the internet and ecommerce in china. From the situation of automobile ecommerce in China, the paper finds that the automobile industry in China, especially automobile sales, remains only superficially affected by the ecommerce. This is a big difference from the developed countries such as U.S. The paper also displays the important aspects to the development of automobile ecommerce in China such as infrastructure, role of the central government, serving the customer better, security, customer trust, delivery, and so on.

This paper uses the principles of business ecology to analyze the problems in China’s e-business construction and probe in the ways for enterprises in different niches to carry out e-business construction. The e-business construction is not the isolated behavior of certain one enterprise and full consideration should be taken into the relations between upper stream and down stream enterprises to form e-business ecosystem. The keystone role of the keystone enterprises in forming e-business ecosystem should be brought into full play. The existence of a great number of nicher enterprises marks a healthy e-business ecosystem, and the dominating enterprises should be restricted and then transformed into the keystone enterprises. Different enterprises in different niches should have different e-business strategies. The hetero-organizations of the government are of great importance to the formation and health of e-business ecosystem.

The title of this paper was chosen to introduce what EM2I really means and how it could be treated as a research area for the research specialists of business information systems and electronic commerce. It functions as offering a few commonplace remarks by way of introduction so that the area researchers may come up with valuable opinions.

The rapid development of mobile commerce (m-commerce) has profound influence on logistics industry. Firstly, through analysis that combines m-commerce and the logistics industry, the paper draws a conclusion that main m-commerce applications in logistics industry include cargo tracking, mobile inventory management, vehicle positioning and M2M (machine to machine) mobile services. Then, we think traditional logistics has entered the stage of electronic commerce logistics and is turning into the stage of m-commerce logistics gradually after analyzing relation between m-commerce and logistics. As m-commerce logistics differs from traditional logistics, there is unique operation process of m-commerce in logistics industry. Finally, from the perspective of value chain, the paper points out that there are three mobile commerce models including B2E (business to employee), B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to customer).

In this paper, by analyzing the coal mine safety accident of present stage, the author has come to a conclusion that the safe accidents on coalface accounting for a lot of coal mine safety accident, and has brought forward the cause leading to this phenomenon. Then, through the discussion about “Overlying Strata Movement Law”, this author has suggested that Electronic Business can be used for the coal mine to prevent and control safe accident on coalface, and has given out the operating pattern of Electronic Business innovatively. This conclusions are most instructive to Chinese coal mine in managing safe accident on coalface and innovative for application of Electronic Business in coal mine safety.

The increasing demand for doing business online calls for higher business interoperability on e-marketplaces (EMp). This drives the development of integration technologies for improving EMp functions. This paper argues that by comparing the cost of business interoperability on EMp brought by the integration technology, firms will more favour joining in public EMp than self building private EMp. In this shift, three integration factors of standard flexibility, service provision and semantic integration are constantly improving EMp functions, which lead to an overall reduction of interaction cost for business interoperation. This will change business behaviours and corporate strategies of most firms and have important implications for firms to make strategies of how to treat EMp to increase business interoperability.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) in today’s global environment, especially the E-business is important to create significant competition advantages to firms and business partners worldwide. Since the objectives and goals are essential factors in the study of supply chain management in the E-business. The purpose of this research paper is to present the research question, review the conceptual framework, ERP and environment for SCMS, study their objectives, impact of SCM and utilize any useful theories that may help to identify the critical factors of SCM. The differences of Pre-Internet and E-business are also presented to clarify further research opportunities in this field.

In the context of E-business, IT organization designs meet the serious challenges. To allow the business to engage in IT-enabled E-business strategy initiatives, transforming traditional IT organization is imperative. As an effective method of solving complex problems and building organism, the theory of integration provides an original idea and methodology for the innovational transformation of IT organization. Based on the investigation of integration theory along with the relevant research results in the field of IRM, this paper explores and expounds the MCAS mode of IT organizational integration and explores the frameworks of IT organizational integration from three aspects of organizational member’s competence, activity and structure and the transforming model of IT organization.

Electronic business and agents are among the most important and exciting areas of research and development in information and communication technology, with considerable potential impact and opportunities for the Maritime sector. This paper proposes the design of a Multi-Agent system for Internet Virtual Chartering Markets (MAVCM). The MAVCM system applies for business-to-business transactions in Maritime markets, and provides mechanisms for Internet-based chartering informational and transactional services. The lifecycle of the proposed system offers a solution for efficiently handling the processes involving a charterer who owns the cargo and employs a shipbroker to find a shipowner to deliver the cargo for a certain freight rate. The objective is to enable Maritime market participants to electronically charter, trade and transport cargos based on information and transactions over Internet via their software agents.