A b s t r a c t This paper presents results from a longitudinal study on the use of ICT for B2B-related business processes in large Swiss companies.In an empirical survey, 68 questionnaires were personally collected from procurement heads and subsequently analysed. The study was initiated by industry partners who wanted to gain more detailed knowledge about the maturity of e-procurement in the Swiss market. Based on an extensive literature review and previous empirical studies, we developed a research framework addressing strategic as well as operational issues. The findings show that reduction of purchase prices is the top priority when setting procurement goals. For 78.2% of the respondents IT makes an important contribution to successfully carrying out the procurement function. Nevertheless, these companies are striving for further optimization and improved process integration. Electronic exchange of invoices (e-invoicing) is a current key topic for over 70% of the companies. Procurement heads sense a lack of supplier involvement, which makes the realization of balanced B2B solution scenarios difficult. The study shows that IT, without doubt, plays a significant role in everyday procurement, but that the expectations of IT are rarely completely fulfilled.

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Abstract. In this paper we describe an approach to efficiently evaluate the usability of an interactive application that has been realized to support various platforms and modalities. Therefore we combine our Multi-Access Service Platform (MASP), a model-based runtime environment to offer multimodal user interfaces with the MeMo workbench which is a tool supporting an automated usability analysis. Instead of deriving a system model by reverse-engineering or annotating screenshots for the automated usability analysis, we use the semantics of the runtime models of the MASP. This allows us to reduce the evaluation effort by automating parts of the testing process for various combinations of platforms and user groups that should be addressed by the application. Furthermore, by testing the application at runtime, the usability evaluation can also consider system dynamics and information that are unavailable at design time.

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