E-Business Initiated Change of Business Relationship Structure and Interaction Process

It is already widely known fact that e-business has been adopted across industries to better manage internal business processes as well as interfacing activities. Different types of e-business systems including E-CRM, E-SCM, ERP1/2 among others are used to manage above mentioned processes. Both in the academic and the business worlds e-business has received undivided attention for over decade now. The focus has been on consumer markets as well as business markets, the latter forms larger proportion of e-business when measured in economic terms. This is our focus area. Contrary to conventional knowledge, it has been illustrated that electronic marketplaces weaken existing business relationships and thus pertinent focus of this paper is not on these marketplaces but on business relationships. Therefore, main purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and empirically display how e-business impacts on the structure and interaction in a business relationships. In a nutshell, this means we are describing novel ways to conceptualize relationship structure and process characteristics. To address this, we have made a broad literature review that covers pertinent parts of e-business literature and applicable aspects of business relationship discussion. A twin case study was conducted to compare the developed theoretical framework with real world presented by the steel industry case studies in order to form solid ground for our empirically grounded framework. The preliminary findings suggest that antecedent for successful e-business adoption is a proper digital infrastructure and from there e-business enables and facilitates routine processes in relationships.