Vertical E-Business Standards and Standards Developing Organizations: A Conceptual Framework

E-business has seen significant growth over the past few years. To fully realize the benefits of e-business, common standards are required to define the syntax and semantics of Web-based information sharing among firms. Recently, numerous vertical standards developing organizations (SDO) have emerged to develop e-business standards. From a standard making perspective, this paper identifies the uniqueness of vertical e-business standards, explains why the consortium-based mechanism is popular among vertical e-business standardization projects and overviews the existing literature on consortia-based standardization. Based on literature reviews and anecdotal vertical e-business SDO cases, we propose a participant-technical content-institutional structure framework, which lays a foundation for vertical e-business SDO research and points out future research opportu-