Editorial: Special issue on WeB 2007

Abstract

This ISeB special issue on e-business reflects a selected set of high-quality papers presented in the Sixth International Workshop on e-Business (WeB) held in Montreal, Canada on 9 December 2007. WeB 2007, sponsored by the AIS Special Interest Group on E-Business, was an ancillary workshop of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). The papers in this special issue demonstrate new findings and new perspectives from e-business research literature. Rapid growth of the Internet and e-commerce has dramatically changed the role of information systems in business. Transforming traditional businesses into e-business platforms has become a global trend. These ebusiness technologies and applications enable new business models, create new industry sectors, and redefine relations and processes within and across organizations. This special issue covers research studying new business technologies and applications from empirical and technical perspectives. The special issue begins with Hsin-Lu Chang’s paper, ‘‘A Roadmap to Adopting Emerging Technology in E-Business—An Empirical Study’’. This paper empirically explores the readiness of enterprises to develop emerging e-business technology. The author proposes a three-staged e-business technology roadmap, from pre-eBusiness, to transactional eBusiness, and then to on-demand eBusiness. By using the diffusion of innovation theory, the author identifies a series of enterprises’ internal capabilities and environmental drivers explaining enterprises’ e-business adoption along the proposed roadmap. The author empirically validates the model based on a survey of 175 businesses from the PC industry in Taiwan. The results demonstrate that when enterprises move from the pre-eBusiness stage to the transactional eBusiness stage, those enterprises’ internal capabilities influence companies more than environmental drivers do. However, environmental factors