| Organizations in a never-ending quest to stay competitive in the global economy are increasingly turning to electronic commerce. Like any new dynamic field, electronic commerce is full of confusion and lacks coherence. To help make sense out of the many meanings, this dissertation collected a wide range of electronic commerce definitions, analyzed them, and developed a taxonomy of electronic commerce perspectives that delineates five major themes. Perspectives are very important because they influence and guide the nature and focus of both business practice and research efforts.; Relatively new notions related to e-commerce have emerged: collaborative commerce and electronic business. The electronic commerce taxonomy is extended to accommodate the various collaborative commerce and electronic business perspectives as well. Studying the relationships among these three concepts on the basis of the taxonomy reveal that electronic business can be considered an overarching concept with electronic commerce and collaborative commerce being only parts of a bigger picture. Consequently a single unifying definition for these concepts is advanced.; Analysis of this integrated definition leads to an e-business definition with knowledge management orientation. The knowledge management view of electronic business highlights the relationship between knowledge management and electronic business. Building on the knowledge management view of electronic business, this research investigated the role of knowledge management in electronic business in several ways. First, it analyzed the knowledge handling that occurs within a selected class of electronic business systems, as a springboard for identifying knowledge handling innovations for that class. This is illustrated with an analysis of Web-oriented decision support systems. Second, a model of knowledge management activities, called knowledge chain, is constructed and explored in terms of whether such activities are performed in achieving organization goals, which activities are amenable to technology support or execution, and whether technology enabled or facilitated knowledge management and enhances competitiveness. This is illustrated by anecdotal evidence from the literature and by an empirical study of leaders of knowledge management initiatives worldwide.; Researchers, practitioners, and application developers can benefit from this study. For developers of electronic business applications, it gives a roadmap to devise new electronic business technologies and decision support applications in electronic business. For practitioners, the knowledge chain model is a way to look at electronic business in terms of knowledge management activities an organization should adopt, design, and execute better than its competitors. For researchers, they can use the model in framing prescriptions to identify "best practices" for contributing to competitiveness via the conduct of knowledge management and means for sustainable competitive advantage. |
