SME e‐business and supplier‐customer relations

This article starts with definitions of e‐business and a summary of what it means for businesses. This is followed by a quick description of a model of e‐business adoption. It then argues that modelling has reached a secure enough state for us to be able to predict benefits of adoption with some certainty and to determine a cost‐effective way forward for most smaller businesses. It then reviews briefly some evidence about adoption and interprets this in the light of the previous arguments. This article is very definitely an opinion article. It is not based on a comprehensive research programme. Rather, it is based on an interpretation of the masses of private and confidential evidence that flow in the veins of IBM, to which the author has access. It is skewed towards how e‐business affects the relationships between companies and their customers.