Research in Progress Paper: Electronic Commerce Systems across Organisational Boundaries

Business-to-business electronic commerce is about bringing about mutual improvements for both trading partners. Far from all of the Internet-based eCommerce endeavours are successful, due to the fact that many organisations overlook the fact that moving to the Internet is not just a matter of creating a Web presence, but that their business processes and organisational infrastructures have to be modified and adopted appropriately. Since many stakeholders – with various goals – are involved, system analysis and integration is extremely difficult. Given this, it is perceived to be interesting to explore and study how, so called, Enterprise Models can be used for modelling inter-organisational aspects of e-Commerce system integration. Change management is identified as particularly important for successful e-Commerce implementation. In order to understand a specific change it is necessary to understand the desire for (driving forces), and resistance to (impeding forces), the specific change. Based on previous research on e-Commerce use, a simplified and tentative model of driving and impeding forces for successful eCommerce use is therefore suggested in this Research in Progress Paper. Two business process modelling examples, based on the Enterprise Modelling approach, are also illustrated and described in the paper.