Enablers and impediments to IT adoption in business relationships: Evidence from Australia and Finland

The purpose of the paper is to describe the impediments to information technology (IT) adoption and possible solutions in the context of business relationships by drawing on case studies conducted in both Australia and Finland in the heavy manufacturing sector. Across various industry sectors managers have adopted different types of IT tools to coordinate their relationships with their counterparts. However there has been little academic research in this area until recently, as the research has been focused on large firms in technology rich industry sectors. Through the cases discussed we attempt to identify some of the impediments to IT adoption, strategies for overcoming them and by doing so we are adding to the body of marketing knowledge on business relationships. The in depth case studies were conducted in the steel manufacturing industry in Finland and in the marine defence (shipbuilding) industry in Australia. The findings indicate that doubts about the security of shared information, missing mutual benefits, incompatibility of IT systems, inadequate IT resources, uncertainty about the future directions of the relationship, information rich working routines i.e. face to face communication, IT deployment not being part of the industry standard and investments not justified by the relationship seems to be the most significant impediments to IT adoption in heavy manufacturing in Australia and Finland. For managers this paper provides some insights to manage IT adoption in the heavy manufacturing industry. For academics, we broaden the discussion on IT adoption in the context of business relationships in industry sectors that have not been traditionally targeted. This paper focuses on one industry sector using case studies and as such there are limitations which mean the generalizations are weaker than in a broad scale quantitative research. Business relationships and information technology Various aspects of long-term business relationships have been studied since the 1960s across a number of industries (see e.g. steel industry, Johanson, 1966; Snehota, 1982; advertising industry Halinen, 1994). The introduction of information technology (IT) such as mainframe computers in the 1970s changed the face of business within organisations and with the advent of PCs, networking and the internet IT impacted relationships between organisations (Markus and Robey, 1988; Grover, 1993; Stern and Kaufmann, 1985; Chatterjee and Ravichanddran, 2004). According to Ryssel, Ritter and Gemünden (2004) IT in the business context includes computer hardware, software, communication systems and inter-organizational systems. In their extensive literature review on business to business marketing Reid and Plank (2000) addressed the need to study the influence of computers on business marketing. Building on this work a number of studies have appeared after the publication of the article that have investigated in a broad sense the influences of IT on business relationships (see Leek, Naudé and Turnbull, 2003; Ryssel, Ritter and Gemünden, 2004; Ritter and Walter, 2006; Salo, 2006a). Generally speaking the entry of IT into business relationships has provided instant direct access to information within and between organisations improving communication