Assessing and enhancing e-business processes

Although e-commerce has become a common basis for business transactions in most markets, other elements of e-business are not as widely used yet. This paper extends and operationalizes a previously developed e-business process model by Basu and Muylle (2007). Specifically, it presents evaluation measures for each process and an instrument based on those measures, and describes an effective approach to assess firms’ e-business capabilities. The assessment approach is illustrated using data from a diverse collection of firms in the Flanders region of Belgium. This is followed by an illustration of how such assessments can assist firms in identifying e-business initiatives in line with strategic and market priorities, using a subset of the firms as examples.