How can the organizational structure of a business be influenced by an eBusiness strategy?

E-business can be described as the new business logic that operates in a world without boundaries. It refers to a broader definition of Electronic Commerce, not just buying and selling but also servicing customers, providing an integrated business environment and offering added value services. Developing e-business models for conducting e-business is not simply about the adoption of new technologies. It also concerns changes in work practices, in customer/supplier relationships, in the way products are delivered to consumers, in marketing practices and changes in staff skills needed to support e-business.

Accordingly, e-business models signify new opportunities for re-organizing the way businesses are currently practiced. Knowledge about e-business models, developed in current IST projects, is fragmented and often can only operate within the narrow boundaries of their defined context (e.g., industry or region). Because of the lack of business model implementation knowledge, several results that are good from a technical perspective fail in the early commercialization phase. This paper suggests a theoretical framework based upon four thematic priorities proposing factors of broad and sustainable adoption.

The paper is organized in four further sections. The second section presents an overview of e-business models definitions and classifications as these are reported in the current literature. Section three proposes an alternative classification of work on e-business models, arguing that the organization of relevant work in organizational, societal, individual and technical themes can provide a framework enabling the comprehensive study of factors affecting the adoption of e-business models. Section 4 illustrates how this framework can be used in practice to review the findings of a number of current Key Action II projects that are clustered within the e-factors project. Finally, section 5 suggests how this work can be taken further in order to provide a useful tool to policy makers and practitioners.