The rapid rise of e-business has brought profound impact on, as well as significant challenges to, businesses of all sizes. The lack of anticipated engagement in e-business by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is still a concern to the UK government. Findings from the literature appear to have revealed a contradictory picture of SMEs’ engagement in e-business. There is limited systemati...

SMEs (smallto medium-sized enterprises) in the manufacturing industry are impacted by enormous changes in their business processes. E-commerce-related developments have reduced the importance of physical branches and moved it toward more sophisticated and e-commerceenabled supply chains for products and services. This article analyzes the differences among SMEs in the manufacturing sector in fo...

This paper, selected for the category “Best papers from 1959 to 2008”, was first published in WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK 43(4)2001:339–350 and has been revised for reprint. The paper examines the situation of information systems (IS) outsourcing in a business sector intrinsic to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). A survey among German SMEs in a specific manufacturing industry yielded the fol...

Today, the software industry is one of the most rapidly growing sectors and small software development companies play an important role in economy. Many such organizations have been interested in Software Process Improvement (SPI). It has been observed that the successful implementation of SPI methodologies is generally not possible within the context of small and medium-sized software enterpri...

In the last decades numerous developments and legal changes moved the utility industry towards a liberalized market. Utility enterprises have to stay competitive and reduce costs while managing more complex IT systems. The authors of this work see special demand for aligning business and IT for small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in this industry and identify Enterprise Architecture Manage...

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been the driving force to Chinese Taipei's economic development; especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, SMEs enjoyed a strong position in Chinese Taipei's production outputs, numbers of enterprises, numbers of employees and export value. During that period, the growth of the SME sector was mainly driven by the dynamic growth of enterprises in the manuf...

this paper addresses the issue of the relationship between the type of organizational / economic structure and organizational entrepreneurship in small- and- medium- sized enterprises (smes). it further provides discussions on mechanical/organic structures as well as organizational entrepreneurship and knowledge structure. in another section, the methodology of the research includes hypotheses,...

Against a background of the low engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in ebusiness, this article investigates the impact of e-aggregation applications, provided by emerging vertical application service providers (VSPs), and defined as “an e-business application, promoted by a trusted third party, which engages a significant number of SMEs by addressing an important shared busin...

The discipline of knowledge management is no longer emerging in large organizations, but also small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are focusing on finding the right process that will allow them to make advantages of their intellectual capital. Using survey data from 219 small and medium-sized enterprises in Austria and Switzerland, this chapter illustrates the four key knowledge processes ...

Customer Relationship Management Systems have been employed by large organisations for a number of years, but with the availability of inexpensive hardware and software and easy access to the Internet, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are now starting to adopt CRM systems. This paper describes a study of the factors influencing CRM adoption in 126 SMEs in the retail, manufacturing and ...