E-Business, also called digital business, has an increasingly recurring role in daily transaction facilitation in marketing channels and dyadic trading relationships. These developments imply that the findings of this thesis are more relevant than ever. Managers in various positions need to deeply understand the mutual interrelations between marketing and IT use conditions.

The thesis aims at answering two research questions:

RQ 1: What are the conditions influencing e-Business system implementation processes?

RQ 2: What e-Business-enabled performance effects result from e-Business system use, and how does the use of e-Business systems affect dyadic performance?

The thesis comprises five case studies focusing on different e-Business forms in four Swedish marketing channel contexts. The five empirical studies were conducted in different contexts (B2B, B2G and B2C), exploring different levels of analysis, and span across a 20-year period, from 1988 to 2008.

A literature review was conducted after the five case studies were published. Knowledge and findings identified from mainly the relationship view and information systems literature were synthesised and applied to the five publications in retrospective.

The overall conclusion drawn from this thesis is the crucial importance of human success conditions. The degree of commitment and pro-active actions of human beings – individually and collectively among all stakeholders involved  – and their competencies decisively influence the degree to which the e-Business implementation and diffusion process will be successful, and in turn the business value outcomes that can be attained.

The impact of technology spillover sources on innovation performance has been studied intensively and extensively. But little research has been conducted on evaluating different technology spillover sources with a unified framework. Moreover, the role of universities and research institutes as alternative sources of technology in developing countries, including China, has been theoretically and empirically marginalized. This study presents a unified analysis framework of innovation performance with four technology spillover sources integrated, namely public R&D investments in universities and research institutes, inward foreign direct investment, technology import, and export activities. The impact of these technology spillover sources on innovation performance is compared using provincial data on Chinese high-tech industries. The results indicate that the role of public R&D differs across interior and coastal regions of China. Advanced technology from developed countries has not been effectively transferred to China through foreign direct investment. Technology import has a slight contribution to innovation performance. And export activities are found to play different roles across regions. Overall, the findings indicate that indigenous R&D efforts have laid down solid innovative capacity for Chinese high-tech industries.

Enterprise systems are configurable and customized computer-based information systems, claiming to provide a total, integrated solution to firms' information-processing needs. 'Management support', 'User Involvement', and 'Project Management Experience' are considered as three of the most important critical success conditions for Enterprise systems change projects. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss new preconditions for established critical success conditions in Enterprise systems change projects. Traditional Enterprise systems technology and traditional plan-driven project management methods are not in an effective way supporting the established critical success conditions for Enterprise systems change projects. Supported by the findings from one case study, we propose that new preconditions, such as modern Enterprise systems technology, more narrowly defined projects and agile methods are matching each other. We also propose that this combination of new preconditions is more appropriate for supporting the realization of critical success conditions for Enterprise systems change projects

Traditional ES technology and traditional project management methods are supporting and matching each other. But they are not in an effective way sup-porting the critical success conditions for ES development. Although the findings from one case study of a successful modern ES change project is not strong empirical evidence, we carefully propose that the new modern ES technology is sup-porting and matching agile project management methods. In other words, it pro-vides the required flexibility which makes it possible to put into practice the agile way of running projects, both for the system supplier and for the customer. In addition, we propose that the combination of modern ES technology and agile project management methods are more appropriate for supporting the realization of critical success conditions for ES development. The main purpose of this paper is to compare critical success conditions for modern enterprise systems development projects with critical success conditions for agile information systems development projects

Wermland Paper är ett medelstort företag med cirka 350 medarbetare som producerar säckpapper och tekniska specialpapper. Omsättningen uppgår till cirka 1 miljard SEK och omkring 90 % av Wermland Papers produktion exporteras till cirka 70 länder över hela världen. Wermland Paper har en fragmenterad kundstruktur, som består av 800 kunder.

Den tidigare situationen var den att Wermland Papers två pappersbruk arbetade med två versioner av samma affärssystem. Dessutom uppfattades detta affärssystem vara dåligt implementerat på de båda bruken. Under våren 2006 beslutade därför Wermland Papers styrelse att det existerande affärssystemet avseende OLF-modulerna (Order, Lager, Fakturering) skulle ersättas av ett nytt webbaserat affärssystem. Utvecklingen och implementeringen av detta nya affärssystem, som stöd för fallföretagets två bruk och deras olikartade säljorderprocesser, är med andra ord ett exempel på ett fleranläggningsprojekt.

Kapitlets syfte är att beskriva och analysera framgångsfaktorer vid ett affärssystembyte för ett medelstort företag i den svenska pappersbruksindustrin. När studien inleddes visste förstås ingen att det aktuella affärssystembytet skulle bli framgångsrikt. Ett drygt år efter införandet av de nya OLF-modulerna uppfattas detta affärssystembyte som en framgångssaga inom Wermland Paper. Lärdomarna från denna fallstudie torde därför vara till nytta för andra organisationer som står i begrepp att vilja genomföra ett framgångsrikt affärssystembyte.

Information Technology (IT) has made it easier for firms to communicate globally. Improved IT capabilities and the increased global collaboration have been drivers of the growth of IT ´outsourcing´. This growth has resulted in a variety of IT ´outsourcing´ terms used to denote both global and domestic "client - IT-supplier" relationships. An introductory literature review showed that there exist no common standard definitions of ´outsourcing´ terms used for describing the contracting of ISD activities between a client and an IT-supplier. This may lead to confusion. The first purpose chosen for the paper is therefore to review how the variety of commonly used ISD ´outsourcing´ terms are defined in the literature. Based on these identified definition differences, the second purpose is then to propose a structured set of definitions of ISD ´outsourcing´ terms.

The review process of IT/ISD ´outsourcing´ research included two steps. Firstly, a literature search study was conducted. The literature search study resulted in the collection of about 240 articles. The second step of the literature review process included reading each paper. The selection criterion for the articles to be included in the review study was that the article should focus on IT/ISD ´outsourcing´. As a result, about 100 of 240 articles were reviewed. These articles constitute the majority of the articles studied in the literature review.

From the literature review, different definitions of the variety of ISD ´outsourcing´ terms have been identified. One conclusion drawn from the literature review is that many of the different ISD ´outsourcing´ terms are used as special cases of the generic ´ISD outsourcing´ term. The different ISD ´outsourcing´ terms found in the literature have been analysed and categorised based on a geographical distance perspective. Another finding from the literature review is that the relationship perspective often is neglected when ISD ´outsourcing´ terms are defined. Therefore, definitions from a relationship perspective for the majority of the ISD ´outsourcing´ terms identified are proposed. The proposed ISD ´outsourcing´ definitions provide a structured set of definitions based on both the geographical distance perspective and the relationship perspective. Furthermore, a graphical representation of how different IT-supplier locations, from the client perspective, relate to the definitions of six of the proposed ISD ´outsourcing´ terms is provided.

The sluggish pace of e-commerce implementation has been attributed to various implementation barriers. Many SMEs have found it difficult to implement an e-commerce strategy because of low usage of e-commerce and IT by customers and suppliers, lack of knowledge or IT expertise in the SME, and limited awareness of the opportunities. Another prominent impeding condition has been the lack of e-commerce standardization across different IT vendors.

In the beginning of the current decade, the Wermland Chamber of Commerce in Sweden realized that the degree of e-commerce adoption and usage within the region of Wermland was very low. In 2003, the Wermland Chamber of Commerce therefore decided to launch a "regional hub" marketplace, called Portal Meetingpoint Wermland (PMW), aiming at finding alternative e-commerce solutions which are simpler and less expensive.

PMW provides value to its customers by providing IT-supported services to be used to increase inter-organizational integration in their dyadic trading relationships. This e-business portal has initially concentrated on providing different types of e-invoicing services by linking itself to two major IT vendors.

In early 2006, this e-business portal initiative was chosen by eBSN (the European e-Business Support Network for SMEs) to be the best practice e-commerce case among European SMEs. The project leader of PMW comments on the perceived success in the following way:

"One unique characteristic of our model, explaining our success, is that we deliberately have chosen to focus relatively sparsely on the technology and instead focus our efforts on solid and well-laid implementation support, for both the receiver and the sender of e-invoices."

The main research question for the paper is: What are the main driving and impeding conditions influencing on the usage of IT-supported inter-organizational services as applied within the network of SMEs linked to the e-business Portal Meetingpoint Wermland?