E-business capabilities in developed and developing countries: Different or the same?

Abstract

2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Abstract -This paper compares the e-business capabilities in developed and developing countries; in particular the awareness and usage of e-business tools and the barriers / drivers of adoption. We surveyed 136 managers of organizations (in both developed and developing countries) and analyzed the responses via the SPSS Statistics software package. A number of statistically significant differences were found between the 2 sets of organization; interestingly, however, a number of areas showed minimal difference between the 2 sets of organizations, suggesting the gap between them beginning to close.Keywords -e-business, developed vs. developing countries, operations managers I. INTRODUCTIONThis paper studies the use of e-business tools as well as the drivers and barriers to their adoption across both developed and developing countries to investigate differences between the 2 sets of countries. E-business adoption has moved from a 'nice to have' to a necessity due to the vital role it plays in global businesses [1,2], with many suggesting that the question is not whether or not e-business tools should be adopted but how this adoption should be conducted [3,4]. E-business tools offer a large array of benefits to those that implement them; examples include increased competitive advantage, improved communication, improved agility, increases in efficiency and access to new markets [5,6]. Similar benefits of adoption include reduced costs and increased process improvements [7,8] as well as improvements in inventory management, distribution and production planning [9,10].In recent years there has been an increased interest in the role that e-business plays in the field of operations and supply chain management [11,12]; it is for this reason that this paper investigates e-business tools from an operations management perspective. Much has been written about the benefits of e-business tool adoption, however there are a vast array of different tools available to organizations [7] and as such there is currently limited understanding on which tools are used most often and which are the most effective. Similarly, there has been limited research on e-business tool adoption outside of developed countries such as those in Europe, North America and Japan [1]. Those studies that have looked at the diffusion of e-business tools have concluded that developing countries lack the levels of e-business implementation present in developed countries [1,13]. There has, however, not been a single study confirming these supposed differences. All of these factors serve as motivations for conducting this study. A. The e-business toolsAs this study investigates e-business ...

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