Understanding the Diversity of Interconnections between IS: Towards a New Typology of IOS

Electronic exchanges of information between Businesses have continued to grow over recent decades. Though the emergence of new technologies, firms are facing new opportunities to build Interorganizational Information Systems (IOSs) to organize electronic data exchanges to update their own information systems. In this paper, we focus on flows from suppliers to retailers of product information, a set of data that describe the product manufactured by suppliers and retailed by wholesalers to the end consumer. We propose a new methodology to analyze IOSs, by considering how suppliers build their sending systems, how retailers build their receiving systems and how their interconnections lead to the creation of IOSs. Through a qualitative research based on interviews and documentation reviews, we describe and discuss the possibilities of interconnections between sending and receiving systems based on data privacy, structural linkages and message interdependencies.