| The explosive growth of the Internet and electronic commerce (also known as e-commerce) is forcing organizations to reevaluate the rules of doing business. An Internet presence has become a prerequisite for any serious organization whose market focus is located outside a fifty-mile radius of its physical location. This is impacted by an organization's ability to conduct e-commerce over the Internet. This places an increased demand on organizational information technology (IT) staff who must maintain these evolving computing environments composed of an increasing number of technologies.; In order to compete, small ad mid-sized organizations must now find ways to access target markets that were once beyond their grasp. To do this, they are finding that they must adopt many of the same high-performance IT solutions as Fortune 500 companies, yet are having to implement these solutions with much smaller IT budgets, IT staffs, and IT resources. As an alternative, some organizations are outsourcing all or part of the technology support functions using a new type of strategic business partner called an application service provider or ASP.; The purpose of this dissertation is to explore characteristics of application service providers. The dissertation examines the reasons some organizations are moving to the ASP model for technology support, and how this movement impacts the organization's IT support function, organizational IT structure, and facilitation of e-commerce. |
