Diffusion of E-Business Standards: Empirical Results

Abstract

Advances in information and communication technologies and standards offer new ways of interacting between humans and machines and machine-to-machine communication, thereby inducing intended and unintended business process changes in many areas. Consequently, new networked coordination forms utilizing these information infrastructures influence spatial and temporal restrictions and, e.g., make it increasingly difficult to identify an enterprise’s regional, temporal, and organizational boundaries. For example, the automation of inter- and intra-enterprise business processes is supposed to influence economic and social reality. Many phenomena witnessed in globally networked markets cannot sufficiently be explained since large parts of the underlying dynamics are not yet well understood. The challenges of a globally networked economy are to understand the governing dynamics in networks better and to conceive and implement strategies in order to take advantage of these new possibilities. A combination of a more positivistic approach towards information systems and network analysis and normativistic research into prototyping and simulation may offer a valuable path towards an improved understanding of the basic principles underlying networks. This dual mode of research may support the network diffusion theory in understanding the dynamics behind emerging network standards and adoption behavior, as well as the overall benefit or impact of e-business standards on the industry and the national level (Beck et al. 2005b).