Accounting-oriented information systems for identifying and planning the enterprise-wide resources needed to take, make, distribute, and account for customer orders. The basic premise of these systems is to implement a single information warehouse that will service all of the functional areas of a business.
Published in Chapter:
Action Research Methods
Patrice Braun (University of Ballarat, Australia)
Copyright: © 2005
|Pages: 5
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59140-575-7.ch001
Abstract
To date, most research into the implications of the Internet for SMEs has focused on individual business barriers to ICT and e-commerce adoption. Such research has shown that SMEs tend to be time- and resource-poor, with their size being their main disadvantage vis-à-vis ICT adoption (OECD, 2000; Van Beveren & Thompson, 2002). Perhaps the question is not whether small firms have adopted ICT, but rather where are small firms in terms of their ICT adoption. ICT encompasses a series of separate yet interrelated components; for example, electronic mail (e-mail), the Internet, the Web, and e-commerce, which can be adopted in a variety of social and business settings. Hence, it is suggested that ICT cannot be considered as a single technological innovation but rather as a series of (process) innovations, potentially resulting in variable ICT adoption patterns (Walczuch, Van Braven, & Lundgren, 2000).