The need for a processual view of inter-organizational systems adoption

In order to sustain competitiveness, companies need to adopt electronic commerce (EC) enabled inter-organizational systems (IOS) to improve the efficiencies of entire supply chains. Adoption of IOS by companies, however, has proved difficult since such systems span organizational boundaries. Understanding IOS adoption is hampered by a lack of theory that can capture the complexity involved in IOS adoption since previous studies mostly employ the factor approach. In this paper, using Efficient Consumer Response as an example of an EC-enabled IOS, we demonstrate that the acknowledgement of the inter-organizational context of these systems naturally introduces the need for the processual approach and different notions of causality. We also show how the factor and the processual approaches to theorizing IOS adoption can be used in a complementary way. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.