A Preliminary Study of the Practices and Processes of B2B E-commerce Evaluation and Benefits Realization in Taiwanese Hospitals

Abstract

Many hospitals still have not fully received the expected benefits from their investments in Business-to- Business (B2B) electronic commerce (e-commerce). Senior executives in these hospitals are often under increasing pressure to find a way to evaluate the contribution of their B2B e-commerce investments to business performance and to ensure that the expected benefits from these investments are eventually delivered. This is as true in hospitals as it is in the other industries. However, relatively little research has examined how Taiwanese hospitals evaluate their B2B e-commerce investments and to what extent their B2B e-commerce benefits are realized. Hence, the authors take a multi-case study approach to investigate the practices and processes of B2B e-commerce evaluation and benefits realization and their impact on B2B e-commerce benefits and user satisfaction in Taiwanese hospitals. Issues arising from the study include a lack of B2B benefits realization methodology or process and a lack of understanding of B2B benefits realization practices. The results also reveal that a B2B investment evaluation methodology or process was used in most hospitals interviewed. However, there appears to be a lack of proper B2B investment post-implementation review measures in most participating hospitals. Moreover, the findings also show that the level of B2B investment evaluation methodology or process adoption was directly related to the levels of organizational IT maturity and user satisfaction. Furthermore, the authors found that most Taiwanese hospitals in general had not allocated sufficient resources and funding to undertake proper evaluation of their B2B investments.