Guidelines for Managing B2B Standards Implementation

Predictions are often made stating that Businessto-Business (B2B) endeavours will grow in numbers extremely fast, but little is known about realworld standards usage and implementations (Chan and Swatman, 2002; Edifecs, 2000). B2B refers to “...the use of the Internet and Web-technologies for conducting inter-organizational business transactions.” (Teo and Ranganathan, 2004). It is focused on streamlining transactions both internally within an organisation, and externally with others (Ersala et al, 2002). Coordination across systems in an organisation is even part of how enterprise systems can be defined, as an integrated planning and resource management system that coordinates information across all enterprise functions (Bendoly et al, 2009). B2B implementation is a complex issue, and much of it is still unknown (Teo and Ranganathan, 2004; Jap and Mohr, 2002; Baghdadi, 2004). This is shown by organisations still having problems in implementation, in spite of the advantages brought about by standards (Premkumar et al, 1994). Hence, simply investing in B2B technology does not automatically lead to improved performance. Previous studies have shown that each IT implementation includes additional concepts (or assets) that impact IT, and finally also the organisation (Kohli and Devaraj, 2004; Lee and Lim, 2003). According to Swann ABSTRACT