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1、Bringing the “e-” to Corporate America: An Analysis of e-Business Adoption and its Impact on Firm PerformanceFang Wu*+Department of MarketingMcCombs School of BusinessUniversity of Texas at AustinAustin, TX 78712Tel: (512) 232-2764Fax: (512) 471-1034E-mail: fangwumail.utexas.eduVijay MahajanDepartme
2、nt of MarketingMcCombs School of BusinessUniversity of Texas at AustinAustin, TX 78712Tel: (512) 471-0840Fax: (512) 471-1034E-mail: vijay.mahajanbus.utexas.eduSridhar Balasubramanian*Department of MarketingMcCombs School of BusinessUniversity of Texas at AustinAustin, TX 78712Tel: (512) 471-5471Fax:
3、 (512) 471-1034E-mail: sridhar.balasubramanianbus.utexas.eduJune 2001We thank Anitesh Barua, Richard Briesch, Linda Golden, Phillip Zerrillo, Raji Srinivasan, James Westphal, other faculty and doctoral students, and various seminar participants at the McCombs School of Business, UT Austin for their
4、useful suggestions.* Support from the Center for Customer Insight (CCI) at the McCombs School of Business is acknowledged.+ Support from the Dora Bonham Memorial Fund at the University of Texas is acknowledged. Bringing the “e-” to Corporate America: An Analysis of e-Business Adoption and its Impact
5、 on Firm PerformanceAbstractAcross industries, firms are actively engaged in the adoption and integration of e-business tools and practices to better manage their internal processes, as well as their interfaces with the external environment. While the importance of e-business initiatives has been wi
6、dely accepted, little is known about (1) how firms differ in their levels and kinds of e-business adoption and integration, (2) the antecedents of such variations across firms, and (3) the impact of the intensity of e-business adoption on firm performance. In this study, a fine-grained framework tha
7、t captures the antecedents and implications of e-business adoption is proposed and empirically tested using data collected from senior managers in four industries (i.e., the telecommunications, computer hardware, semiconductor, and manufacturing equipment industries). Applying an adoption matrix tha
8、t captures the depth of e-business adoption across four business function domains, we find that firms differ significantly in the intensity of e-business adoption across these domains, and that the performance implications of e-business adoption are best studied in a domain-specific context. The fin
9、dings of this paper provide new insights into the actual e-business adoption patterns across firms, the antecedents of those adoption patterns, and the firm-level performance implications of e-business strategy.IntroductionReal economic life, it seems, is a tad more complicated than the input-output
10、 models of economic theorists. Pumping investment into a powerful new technology does not instantly and automatically yield productivity gains. At the start of the steam engine-electric motor transition, steam-based investments still worked and were still carried on company balance sheets. To reap t
11、he full promise of electricity, an almost endless number of practical details had to be worked out. That took time and enormous creativity. As with todays dream of the paperless office, no one knew what a fully electrified factory would be like or how best to manage it.-Michael Rothschild in Forbes
12、ASAP (March 1993)The uncritical praise regarding the rise of the “dot-coms” and subsequent lamentations of their downfall have both obscured a quieter, wide-based adoption and integration of a range of e-business tools and practices across industries. Increasingly, both managers and researchers real
13、ize that the power and properties of information can be leveraged in creative ways across functional domains, and that selling online to customers (i.e., e-commerce or e-marketing focused activities) constitutes but a sliver of the potential possibilities engendered by e-business. In parallel, there
14、 is an growing understanding that information technology (IT) itself will solve few of a firms problems, and that e-business is less about “throwing away the past and putting in a shiny new future” and more about “leveraging what you already have” (Los Angeles Times, April 2 2001, p. U1).Numerous ex
15、amples of forerunners in e-business adoption have been written up in the popular press with much hope, and some hype. For example, according to the Economist (1999, p.11 ), Dell Computer has achieved an “integrated value chain through e-business,” whereas Cisco Systems has “virtualized” its business
16、 to offer a constant supply of real-time information (p. 12). GM has worked on facilitating both online browsing of dealer inventory and the delivery of “e-price” quotes of the dealers full-line of cars and trucks (Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2001). In the transportation industry, National Transp
17、ortation Exchange and CargoR offer shippers ways to coordinate shipments via digital exchanges (InfoWorld, Dec 4, 2000). Newer and better e-business applications allow vendors to conduct advanced auctions as part of their procurement processes (Business Wire, April 23, 2001).While jargon-laden anecd
18、otal accounts of such advances and numerical statistics extolling their effectiveness are not difficult to find, there is a need to bring a more structured, theoretical focus to bear toward understanding the adoption process within, and implications of e-business adoption for, corporate America. Whe
19、reas there have been numerous discussions in the popular press, and more recently, a few academic research efforts in the area, several issues remain unanswered. First, how should the adoption and integration of e-business by firms be measured? For any phenomenon to be studied rigorously, it is cruc
20、ial that it first be measured appropriately. In reality, “e-business” can reflect a blend of a variety of forms and contents related to IT adoption and integration. However, the present state of attention to construct measurement in the context of e-business adoption is inadequate. The first contrib
21、ution of this paper is to introduce an e-business adoption matrix with a set of associated scales that captures various facets of e-business. These scales constitute a set of operational measures with established properties that can be employed in further theory testing. Our empirical results presen
22、t a snapshot of the current e-business adoption patterns within U.S. corporations and make a strong case for a fine-grained approach toward the study of e-business. (This contribution is consistent with both the gold research priorities demarcated by the Marketing Science Institute, viz., the study
23、of e-business adoption, and the development of firm/marketing performance metrics).Next, little is known about the antecedents that influence the variation in the form and extent of e-business adoption in corporate America. By characterizing e-business at a fine-grained level, we are able to demarca
24、te the differential impact of adoption antecedents on various facets of e-business. An organization seeking to implement a particular facet of e-business would find it useful to identify the pivotal elements conducive to launching such a transformation, and pushing it along the desired strategic and
25、 tactical paths. The second contribution of this paper, therefore, is to theoretically motivate and empirically establish the antecedents that influence specific facets of e-business adoption, enabling a deeper understanding of where a firm should focus its attention and resources. Finally, the impa
26、ct of e-business on firm performance is worthy of careful examination. In fact, the relationship between IT and firm productivity is itself insufficiently established. In grappling with the well-known “productivity paradox” of IT, many studies have failed to indicate a strong, positive link between
27、IT investments and productivity at both the firm and economy levels (e.g., Roach 1987; Loveman 1994; Barua, Kriebel, and Mukhopadhyay 1995; Strassmann 1990). Nobel Laureate Robert Solow pungently observed that “we see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.” In this paper we adop
28、t a fine-grained measurement of e-business adoption and examine a series of linkages between these aspects of e-business adoption and measures of firm performance including efficiency, sales performance, customer satisfaction and relationship development. We avoid applying input-output models that d
29、irectly link aggregate IT spending statistics with aggregate measures of performancerather, we carefully delineate the effects of specific facets of e-business adoption on performance. This represents the practical reality that certain facets of e-business are more likely to impact selected measures
30、 of performance than others. For example, it is likely that e-business adoption related to the firm-market interface is more likely to impact customer relationships, compared with adoption related to the supplier firm interface. Further, a serious confounding effect exists when measures of adoption
31、obtained at an SBU or division level are linked to financial statistics that are generated at the firm level. Our field research indicated that e-business adoption patterns can vary widely across divisions/SBUs within a single firmhence such associations can be misleading. Rather, we measure both ad
32、option and performance at the SBU/division level. Therefore, the third contribution of this paper is to examine the differential implications of each facet of e-business for specific dimensions of firm performance. This paper is organized as follows. We first review the relevant literature. Then, ba
33、sed on field interviews, we propose an e-business adoption matrix that spans four business functionscommunications, internal coordination/administration, order-taking and e-procurement. The overall framework that links (1) the antecedents of e-business adoption, (2) the adoption intensity, and (3) t
34、he impact of adoption on firm performance, is presented next. We then describe the survey methodology, data collection and scale development. The empirical results are presented next, followed by a discussion of the managerial and research implications of our findings, and the limitations of this st
35、udy.Literature ReviewOur conceptual framework is based both on extant studies and independent theoretical arguments. Since e-business is a relatively new phenomenon, there is limited literature that directly addresses its adoption patterns and antecedents within the firm. However, parallel streams o
36、f relevant research exist in the context of organizational adoption of IT and innovations, and the development of innovative products. An innovation has been defined as the adoption of an internally generated or purchased device, system, policy, program, process, product, or service that is new to t
37、he adopting organization (Daft 1982; Damanpour and Evan 1984). The antecedents of organizational innovations may exist at individual, organizational, and/or environmental levels, but the organizational factors have constituted the main focus of research. Numerous studies, mainly in the management li
38、terature, have examined the role of a range of organizational factors in this context, including, but not limited to: specialization (Kimberly and Evanisko 1981), functional differentiation (Baldridge and Burnham 1975), professionalism (Pierce and Delbecq 1977), formalization (Pierce and Delbecq 197
39、7), centralization (Thompson 1965), managerial tenure (Kimberly and Evanisko 1981), technical knowledge resources (Dewar and Dutton 1986), administrative intensity (Damanpour 1987), external and internal communication (Miller and Friesen 1982), and vertical integration (Hull and Hage 1982). Scholars
40、 have also proposed that a number of variables moderate these direct effects on innovation adoption. The proposed moderators variables include (a) organizational type that differentiates between entrepreneurial and conservative firms (Miller and Friesen 1982), between mechanical, organic, and mixed
41、firms (Hull and Hage 1982), between manufacturing and service firms (Damanpour 1991), and between for-profit and non-for-profit firms (Damanpour 1991); (b) the type of innovation that differentiates between administrative and technical innovations (Kimberly and Evanisko 1981), product and process in
42、novations (Ettlie 1983), and radical and incremental innovations (e.g., Dewar and Dutton 1986; Nord and Tucker 1987); (c) the stage of innovation that differentiates between initiation and implementation (Zmud 1982); and (d) the scope of innovation that differentiates between small and large innovat
43、ions (Damanpour 1991). In addition, the hypothesis of Schumpeter (1942) that larger organizations are more intensely innovative than smaller ones has itself been studied in over 100 research articles (Acs and Audretsch 1991).In the marketing arena, Gatignon and Robertson (1986, 1989) propose and tes
44、t a model of innovation adoption using a set of explanatory variables that capture the demand-side competitive environment (including industry concentration, price competitiveness, demand uncertainty, communication openness), supply-side competitive environment (including the degree of vertical coor
45、dination and the availability of supplier incentives), organizational characteristics (including company centralization and task complexity), and decision maker information-processing characteristics (including tolerance for negative information and positive attitudes toward information heterogeneit
46、y). They find that supply-side factors and information-processing characteristics are particularly influential.Another stream of literature has dealt with the relationship between market orientation, innovation, and firm performance. Gatignon and Xuereb (1997) examine the conditions under which each
47、 of three strategic orientations (customer, competitor, and technology) represents the best choice while developing product innovations. They demonstrate that the firms choice of strategic orientation should be sensitive to both its specific strategic objective and the characteristics of the marketp
48、lace. For example, they demonstrate that a pure technology orientation best suits a firm that aims to lead the marketplace in terms of product superiority, but that a combination of consumer- and technology-orientation is more appropriate in markets characterized by uncertain demand. Han, Kim, and S
49、rivastava (1998) examine how the three core components of market orientation (i.e., customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination) affect the two core components of organizational innovativeness (technical versus administrative innovation) en route to affecting corporate performance. Related literature has examined the linka
