Integrating Ed1 Into The Organization's Systems: A Model Of The Stages Of Integration

The growing importance of Electronic Data Interchange for the rapid transmission of intraand inter-organisational communications is becoming widely recognised. EDI itself is little more than a faster mail service: it is the opportunity to integrate EDI with internal application systems and organisational functions which separates it from other forms of electronic telecommunications and makes EDI a truly strategic application, offering comparative advantage at the organisational, national and international levels. This paper discusses the results of a series of case studies of Australian organisations involved with EDI, undertaken to determine whether integration with internal application systems can be defined as a series of comparatively standard and recurring stages. The results of the analysis indicate that while such integration does, indeed, occur in a relatively standard manner for a large class of EDI-using organisations, there are also three other classes of organisation for each of which a different model is appropriate. Although these additional classes are small in terms of the number of organisations of which they are composed, they are significant in terms of their importance and influence on industry in general and on EDI penetration in particular. This paper was presented at ICIS’91 the 12th International Conference on Information Systems in New York, December 1991.