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Part 2: Adoption and Diffiusion; International audience; Communication processes between governments and businesses are increasingly networked. This paper increases our understanding of the information seeking behavior of businesses in the Government-to-Business domain. We conducted a quantitative study among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Netherlands to discover source-channel interaction. The results provided several interactions regarding nature of relationships with sources, channel and source choice. This proves that it is important to consider source and channel choice together to gain an important insight regarding information seeking behavior of businesses. Today’s networked environment implies that besides having direct contact with governments, businesses make use of other sources to get governmental information. In addition, they use various channels to contact these sources, suitable to the type of relationships. This is vital information for governments, because it helps to optimize their service delivery strategy towards businesses.

Part 2: Services and Interoperability; International audience; To deal with tax matters, businesses have various potential sources (e.g., Tax Office, advisor, industry organization, friends/family) in their environment. Those sources can be coupled with an increasingly wide variety of channels (e.g., telephone, face-to-face, website, e-mail) through which information can be obtained. This has led to an increasingly complex information flow between governments and businesses. This paper provides new directions for public service delivery strategies by studying both source and channel choices of businesses using the vignette method. The findings indicate that source and channel choices are determined in different ways (i.e., positive or negative) by different factors. Furthermore, we found that source and channel choices are interrelated. It is concluded that that sources and channels fulfil different roles for information seekers. It is advisable for government to anticipate these roles in the design of their service delivery strategies.

Knowledge about e-governmental service delivery towards businesses in general and the use and choice of service channels in particular is lacking. Current insights are mostly based on research in the context of citizens. Important differences in both domains can be found in the more networked character of the business context. These differences show that research towards the business context is needed. In order to fill the gap we provide an overview of existing knowledge about channel choice in G2B context. To conclude, we present a research agenda for future research on this topic.