Evaluating the Information Architecture of an Electronic Intermediary

Abstract

Electronic intermediaries play an increasingly important role in supporting the coordination of buying and selling organizations. There is much discussion about the preferred information architecture of e-intermediaries and the added value for buying and selling organizations. Domain-specific characteristics of the trading situation should be taken into account when evaluating the added value of the information architecture of an e-intermediary. The information architecture determines the way the mutually dependent activities of buying and selling organizations are coordinated. This influences the added value and acceptance of an intermediary. In this article we first discuss a simulation approach to evaluate the added value of the information architecture of e-intermediaries. Thereafter, we discuss the main coordination characteristics of influence on the information architecture based on the information, facilitating, matching, and trusted roles of the e-intermediary. We use these characteristics to evaluate the potential added value of an intermediary in an empirical study. The added value is determined by simulating a real company situation and comparing this situation with a hypothetical future situation including an e-intermediary. In the last part of this article we draw some conclusions with respect to the added value and characteristics of e-intermediary information architectures and the limitations of this approach.