No abstract

The main purpose of this research is to investigate and prioritize the extra-organizational E-business adoption factors among Iranian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The research is structured around the two dimensions of extraorganizational or exogenous factors. These dimensions are environmental factors (a set of economical, political, social,legal and market/industry issues) and technological factors (Ebusiness technologies characteristics). After conducting an indeep literature review and eliciting the potential adoption factors, we used a combination of the modified Delphi and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods to explore the most important extra-organizational factors and ascertain their relative importance in expert's view. Results indicate that the effect of environmental factors on E-business adoption by Iranian SMEs is greater than technological factors. In the category of environmental factors, customer demand and supplier/partner pressure have the most impact, whereas the existence of supportive rules have the least effect on using Ebusiness. The study also shows that in the category of technological factors, implementation and maintenance cost of E-business rank last, while compatibility and awareness of potential benefits (relative advantages) of E-business are the most important adoption factors in Iranian SMEs.