資訊與通訊標準的績效評估

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 成果報告

資訊與通訊標準的績效評估

中 華 民 國 93 年 8 月 31 日

資訊與通訊標準的績效評估

研究成果報告

Abstract (英文摘要)

Standards developed in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) has become increasingly important in enhancing supply chain management. Firms that create successful ICT standards can seize new opportunities in industrial collaboration, while firms that are locked out of standardization process, or remain laggards in utilizing the standards face difficulties. However, the implementation of ICT standards also becomes critical, while corporate supply chains have become more networked and complex. In this research we will develop a valuation methodology for measuring the costs and benefits of implementing ICT standards. This new valuation methodology will be able to evaluate the value from the perspectives of business process, products, information infrastructure, customers, and trading partners. At the same time, it simultaneously keeps track of both the internal and the external business environments that influence the success or failure of ICT standards. An empirical study will be used to verify the valuation methodology.

Keywords: Information and Communication Technology, Supply Chain Collaboration, B2B

E-Commerce, IT Valuation, Inter-Organizational Systems

中文摘要 從提昇供應鍊管理績效的層面上來看, 資訊與通訊標準的角色已日漸重要。能夠成功地 在公司內部制定或執行資訊與通訊標準的廠商往往較能掌握供應鍊合作的商機；反之， 未能及時加入標準化行列的商家，或者在標準的執行過程中未能成功與內部資訊系統整 合的公司，在供應鍊的合作上常遇到極大的困難。然而在供應鍊扁平化及日益複雜化的 今日，資訊與通訊標準的制定以及執行比往日來的艱困許多。在這個研究裡，我們將建 議一套資訊與通訊標準的績效評估方法。這套新的評價模式，有別於傳統以財務表現為 指標，而從企業內部的資訊架構面、商業流程面、企業外部的供應商關係及顧客關係， 作整體的績效評估。此模式也同時將企業的內部環境與外部環境併入績效衡量，以期歸 納出影響資訊與通訊標準的成功要素與失敗原因。最後，我們將採用問卷調查的方式驗 證這套模式。 關鍵字: 資訊通訊標準, 供應鍊合作, 企業對企業電子商務, 資訊科技評價, 跨組資 訊系統。

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background

The ICT-enabled collaborative e-business solutions can provide a cost-effective mechanism for organizations to reduce intensive transaction costs with trading partners. They also provide a loosely-coupled data collaboration in order to automate business interchanges between trading partners. By eliminating the information fragmentation, the companies can ensure that design, production, and inventory knowledge is readily available to partners, which results in a significant increase in customer responsiveness. In addition, their infrastructure have been developed to compatible with one another partners in the industry, and thus can save organizations a lot of effort to integrate with internal and external systems.

Yet, creating successful ICT standards is critical.As company’s sensitive data spreads far and wide in the supply chain network, the competition structure among many trading partners is changed. It means the methods of value allocation within the relationship must be devised. At the same time, for the internal operation, the enterprise system requires a massive change in corporate mentality. With nearly instant responses to the requests, the whole organization process has to mobilize at a far quicker pace. In addition, many benefits of standardization such as network effects and improved supplier relationships are lack of an effective measure to translate them into real values (Chang and Shaw 2002). Taking RosettaNet as an example, along with the expense of implementing RosettaNet partner interface processes (PIPs) can be as high as $200,000 to $500,000 per PIP, some companies may opt to postpone their investment, which may very well frustrate the RosettaNet progress. The other difficulty steams from the nature of co-adoption that the value always comes in pair companies who adopt the same standard. How to track and allocate the ROI (Return-on-Investment) within the relationship becomes a problem, which adds the difficulties of the large companies to persuade the adoption with their smaller supply chain partners. Also, RosettaNet involves a change in the competitive landscape. Companies that fail to respond to this change may eventually be outpaced by other competitors.

Facing these difficulties, traditional ROI approach and other previous valuation methodologies such as balanced scorecard are not effective tools or comprehensive enough for evaluating this emerging e-business technique in the new era. Traditional ROI analysis only emphasizes tangible payoffs from internal operational improvement. It doesn’t consider other possible breakthrough improvement in such critical areas as information and technology. Also, it has no way to deal with intangibles. Compared with this, balanced scorecard provides a more complete framework that complements traditional financial indicators with measures of performance for customers, internal processes, and innovation. However, it is used to measure the performance of general business operations. When it is applied to measure the performance of ICT standards, the context should be adjusted to fit its special needs (Chang 2003).

1.2 Research Objectives and Questions

The goal of this research is to design a new theory for measuring the value of ICT standards. This new theory can help us evaluate the values from different perspectives – business process, products, information infrastructure, customers, and trading partners, and moreover, draw the roadmaps for better performance. It therefore enables the companies to track financial performance for both tangible and intangible assets, benefits, and costs. At the same time, it simultaneously monitors the readiness of both corporate internal and the external environments for pursuing ICT standards. The focus is first on the RosettaNet (RN) initiatives in semiconductor industry. The framework can provide the benchmarks of what is to be achieved by the RN investment. These benchmarks can later be used to provide a measure of the actual implementation success of other ICT standards. To be more specific, the research mission with its related research questions are addressed below:

Research mission: Develop a theory for measuring the value of ICT standards

Research questions:

(1) What is the business value of ICT standards?

(2) What conditions are required to maximize the values? What are the critical factors to create successful ICT standards?

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The focus of past ICT standards research was mostly on ‘network effect’ to show the relationship between the value of the standardization and the installed base of such technology standards. Researchers used the theory of network and technology standards (i.e. a branch of industrial organization theory) to explain the positive relationship between customer value and large compatible network size. While network effects were considered as the main value stream of ICT standards, other researchers argued ICT standards also have a significant impact on value chain management as well as on the relationships within the value chain. They proposed that the exchange of information and knowledge between the firms forms a higher level of network, which is required of the value-added inter-firm collaboration and innovation.

Two main value components thus become the main focus of this research and related research is reviewed in the following sections:

Technical benefits of ICT standards: the business value results from the improved ICT capabilities because of standardization.

Strategic benefits of ICT standards: the business value comes from the improved process and inter-firm relationships.

2.1 Technical Benefits of ICT standards

Farrell and Saloner (1986) identified three main sources of these benefits. The first is interchangeability of complementary products (i.e. software, training, and consulting services complementing the use of computer). The second is ease of communication (communication about building the standards since everyone talks the same standard, reducing the development time). The third is cost savings from standardization, especially interchangeability of business documents, reducing processing cost of data. David and Greenstein (1990) and Katz and Shaprio (1994) indicated that ICT standards are the example of a technology with positive externalities or network effect. Therefore, supply chain companies can share valuable real-world experiences to enable interoperability in their own systems. The resulting collateral and best practices can significantly decrease the cost of adding new partners or standardizing new processes to be transacted with existing partners and thereby enhance the corporate future IT growth potential (Chwelos et al. 2001).

Based on the review, technology benefits of ICT standards can be realized in four major categories: connection benefits, platform benefits, IT personnel benefits, and future growth potential. Future growth potential refers to IT learning and growth potential due to improved IT capabilities.

2.2 Strategic Benefits of ICT standards

Increasing the use of ICT standard, companies are transforming the nature of the relationships with their external business partners. In particular, many manufacturers are changing their relationships with component suppliers away from traditional arm’s length relations driven by a competitive logic toward new arrangements based on collaboration. These take the form of complex relationships of collaboration that constitutes the basic component of strategic network. Therefore, the past research on inter-firm collaboration value gives the theoretical background to derive the strategic benefits of ICT standards.

The research on inter-firm collaboration focuses on its potential to improve internal processes, supplier/customer relationships, and market potential. For example, past literature concerned with process improvement can be summarized in the following descriptions: productivity improvement, labor savings and cost reductions (Mooney et. al 1995), fewer errors and better utilization of resources (Barua et al. 1995), improved decision quality (Bakos and Treacy 1986), streamlining information flow, (Hilton 1981, Barua et al. 1989, Mukhopadhyay and Cooper 1993), supporting product and service innovation (Kaplan and Norton 1993), enhancing product quality (Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1998), reducing time to market for new products/services, and decreasing the costs of product design (Barua et al. 1995). We can categorize them into (1) direct process benefits, including operational improvement and information improvement due to the process automation and (2) indirect process benefits, capturing the benefits after the technology is integrated with back-office

applications (e.g. ERP system) so companies can use information that resides in an enterprise system to improve relationships within their supply chain.

The benefits from improved relationship focus on better customer service and improved trading partner relationship (Barrett and Konsynski 1982, Chatfield and Bjorn-Andersen 1997). Better customer service represents the impact of ICT standards on customer satisfaction, retention, and acquisition. It depends on whether the new standard can provide a higher level of customer service or a better price. Conventional measurements include price reduction, better service ranking, improving market share (Kaplan and Norton 1993), and reducing request fulfillment time (Porter 1985). On the other hand, a better relationship with trading partners refers to the extent that ICT standards facilitate the expertise that exists among the trading partners and nurtures the trusting climates among them (Srinivasan et. al 1994, Bakos and Brynjolfsson 1993, and Iacovou et al. 1995). Measures of trading partners’ relationship include reducing variance in supplier lead times and improving monitoring of the quality of products/services from suppliers (Mukhopadhyay et al. 1995).

3. RESEARCH FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES

3.1 Research Framework

Based on the literature review, the research framework consists of the following theoretical constructs: value impact of ICT standards, collaboration level, and firm performance. The framework is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Research Framework for Assessing the Value of ICT standards

Collaboration Level

Moderating Factors

Value Impacts of ICT Standards Independent Variables New Customer Acquisition Market share Sales Growth Firm Performance Dependent Variables (+/-) Level 1: Non-Adoption Level 2: Adoption Direct & Indirect

Technology Impacts Direct &Indirect Process Impacts Partner/Customer

Relationships

Level 3: Adoption with High Penetration

Perceived Risks

Luck-in Cost Trust

Value impacts of ICT standards is the mix of direct and indirect technology, process, and inter-firm relationship impacts. Direct technology impacts of ICT standards refer to the improved IT capabilities because of the implementation. Indirect technology impacts of ICT standards refer to IT learning and growth potential due to improved IT capabilities. Direct process impacts include operational improvement and information improvement due to the process automation. Indirect process impacts capture the benefits after the technology is integrated with back-office applications (e.g. ERP system) so companies can use information that resides in an enterprise system to improve relationships within their supply chain. The impacts on relationships include the improvement of customer relations and the improved relations with trading partners.

Facing different environment complexities, organizations, acting as an active unit, choose among collaboration strategies to achieve greater performance of ICT standards. We include three corporate collaboration strategies in the construct of collaboration level, from non-adoption to a high level penetration. We also employed two control variables to account for technical risks and collaboration risks in terms of lock-in costs and trust issues respectively under the consideration that collaboration performance cannot be explained if uncertainty/risks are not appropriately applied (Kumar and Dissel 1996).

3.2 Hypotheses

The research framework is used to derive hypotheses for empirical testing. Our focus lies in the value impacts of extended supply chain relationships, the importance of indirect collaboration impacts, and critical values under different collaboration levels. This focus is not customary in past IOS studies or inter-firm collaboration theories.

The first hypothesis concerns the value impacts of extended supply chain relationships. Extended supply chain structure differs from a traditional linear supply chain relationship in two important ways: first, the formation of partnerships is not only based on contracts or organizational forms, but the partnerships are also information-based. For example, Cisco may not have direct transaction relationships with their tier-two or tier-three component suppliers, but its common IT platform shared with those suppliers enables Cisco to build an information relationship with them. Thereby, their valuable outputs are often intangible assets such as new knowledge. Second, a traditional supply chain structure simply optimized business within the focal firm, however the extended supply chain optimizes business across the networked value chain firms. As a result, maintaining a good relationship with supply chain partners, as well as customers becomes more important than ever in this extended structure. Thus, we argue the traditional process-focused enterprise IT evaluation model will be enhanced with the addition of a perspective of extended supply chain relationships. The following hypothesis captures this notion:

Hypothesis 1. The model that includes the metrics of extended supply chain relationships will have significantly greater explanatory power to firm performance than a model that includes only process metrics.

Now, we turn to the value impacts of ICT standards. ICT standard creates both direct and indirect values to firms. Direct benefits include operational cost savings arising from automation of existing inter-firm information flows, for example, reduced paper work, data re-entry, and error rates. It often has relative short lag effect than indirect benefits. On the other hand, indirect benefits are opportunities that emerge from ICT standards, which refer to the impact of ICT standards on the business processes and relationships, e.g., improved customer service and the potential for process reengineering. Since it typically requires trading partners’ cooperation in undertaking joint economic action with the focal companies, such as new product design and just-in-time delivery of components, we assert that indirect benefits are more related with the effectiveness of collaborative efforts and thus constitute the main revenue stream of ICT standards.

Hypothesis 2. Indirect value metrics of ICT standards exhibit a more significant effect on firm performance than direct value metrics

Furthermore, the integration level of IOS is positively related to the types of benefits companies can receive. Usually, non-integrated IOS systems will offer companies direct benefits only, such as reduced transaction costs and higher information quality. Integrated systems, on the other hand, will offer both high direct benefits and the ability to take advantage of indirect benefits, such as increased operational efficiency, better customer service, and improved inter-firm relationships (Iacovou et al. 1995). Since ICT standards requires high level of system integration among trading partners, we hypothesize that,

Hypothesis 3. The usage of ICT standards enhances the indirect value impacts on firm performance

Next, we turn to the impact of firms’ collaboration strategies on firm performance. We propose that, firms constrained by the resources and capabilities would have their own value focus in different stage of ICT standards. Non-adopters may primarily focus on technology value as there is a need to improve technology capability before they start to implement more expensive and complex ICT standards. In contrast, adopters are more able to realize the process and relationship values and translate them into firm performance as their high level of ICT standards implementation promises more in terms of ongoing operational savings and service enhancement to the target trading partners or customers, even if such systems involve greater implementation costs.

relationships may exhibit stronger association with firm performance while technology value impacts are stronger in non-adopter groups.

Among the adopters, we propose that when firms start to build collaborative information technology with low to medium scope and low penetration level, process value is relatively important to other values. The direct result of collaborative IT is a payoff in terms of improved responsiveness to market changes, shorter product development life-cycles, and better product quality, which are summarized as process values. After the technology has a broad scope of adoption, increasing penetration level of collaborative IT with adopters can be seen as part of an explicit strategy to tie-in customers or partners. The net result is reduced risks and uncertainties in trading relationships (i.e. relationship improvement), accompanied by a payoff in terms of improved input quality, satisfied customers, better customer retention rate, and reduced input costs.

Hypothesis 4b. For adopter firms, with the collaboration level increases, improvement in extended supply chain relationship has a stronger impact on firm performance than process improvement

4. MODEL ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

To empirically test the research theory, we selected a sample population of RosettaNet current and potential member companies. The first survey was sent out to RosettaNet total 224 member companies (excluding the solution providers) in April 2003 and a second wave of the survey was sent out in June 2003. A total of 53 replies were received; the overall response rate was approximately 24%. The Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients were used to ensure model reliability. In this research, the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, ranging from 0.61 for direct process value to 0.94 for firm performance. These scores are high enough to warrant the next phase of the research, focusing on empirical assessment of the research model and testing each of the hypotheses proposed earlier (Nunnally 1978).

4.1 Measures of extended supply chain relationships

To test the significance of extended supply chain relationship on the firm performance (i.e. Hypothesis 1), we employed hierarchical regression analysis (Zaheer and Venkatraman 1995). This procedure allows us to assess changes in the proportion of variance explained (R2) and the statistical significance of the changes with the introduction of the construct representing the value impact of extended supply chain relationship: relationship improvement. We began by regressing firm performance on the variables that explain value impacts from the perspectives of business processes – direct and indirect technology value and direct and indirect process value – and added the relationship construct, assessing the significance of the

change R2. Conceptually, the stages in the analysis can be represented by the following equations:

Firm performance = α0 + β1 direct technology impact + β2 indirect technology impact + β3

direct process impact + β4 indirect process impact + (controls) + ε (1)

Firm performance = α0 + β1 direct technology impact + β2 indirect technology impact + β3

direct process impact + β4 indirect process impact + β5 relationship

improvement + (controls) + ε (2) As shown in Table 1, the construct of extended supply chain relationship adds significantly explanatory power to the model. Hypothesis 1 was supported. The R2 value was incremented by 0.658 to 0.758. The statistical significance of the increment to R2 was high, with the change in the F-statistic significant at p<0.01.

Table 1. Results of Hierarchical Regression Analyses (n=53)

Model Process Perspectives Process Perspective + Relationships

Equation (1) (2) R2 0.658 0.758 F 14.15 19.264 Sig. F 0.000 0.000 R2 change 0.1 Sig. F change 0.000 Independent variables b. b

Direct Tech. Impact -0.105 -0.11

Indirect Tech. Impact 0.059 0.04

Direct Process Impact 0.044 -0.145

Indirect Process Impact 0.819*** 0.360**

Relationship Improv. 0.699***

4.2 Measures of Direct and Indirect Value Impacts

Hypothesis 2 and 3 attempted to explore the relative importance between direct and indirect value impacts on firm performance and how the impacts would be influenced by firm’s collaboration strategies. Hence, the regression equation is expressed as follows,

Firm performance = α0 + Σβi DV i + Σβ j IDVj + β 6 Collaboration_Level + β 7 IDV ×

Collaboration_Level + (controls) + ε, (3) where DV i (i=1,2) represents the two direct value impacts of ICT standards identified earlier

(i.e. direct technology and process value) and IDVj(j=1,2,3) are the three indirect value

impacts of ICT standards – indirect technology and process value and relationship improvement. Two regressions are reported. The first one used the overall value impacts, while the second one replaced them with the five value constructs in the regression.

The results are presented in Table 2. We find that the values of the R2 for both regressions are above 0.7, suggesting that the value components can explain more than 70% of the variance of firm performance. The overall direct value impacts and indirect value impacts were found significant, indicating a positive association of these collaboration value impacts to firm performance. The result also showed that the p value of overall indirect value impacts is 0.000, significantly larger than the p value of direct value impacts (p=0.02). This suggests that indirect value impacts of ICT standards are more associated with firm performance than direct value impacts. That is, regardless of firm’s collaboration strategies, companies that can realize more indirect collaboration values are more possible to obtain higher firm’s performance, lending support to Hypothesis 2.

Table 2. Regression Results for the indirect value impacts Model (n=53)

Equation: (3)

Regression of overall value impacts

Regression of five value constructs

R2 0.745 0.763

Sig. F 0.000 0.000

Overall Direct Impact (DV) -0.321**

Direct Tech. Impact -0.092

Direct Process Impact -0.194

Overall Indirect Impact (IDV) 1.30***

Indirect Tech. Impact 0.085

Indirect Process Impact 0.470**

Relationship Improv. 0.798***

Collaboration Level 0.120 0.153

IDV*Collaboration Level -0.277 -0.271

Note. Entries reported above are coefficients. Significance levels: ***p≤0.01; **0.01<p≤0.05;* 0.05<p≤0.10.

The moderating effect of collaboration strategies on indirect value impacts as proposed in Hypothesis 3 is negative to the firm performance but not statistically significant (p=0.359), hence we reject Hypothesis 3. Figure 2 depicts the moderating effect of collaboration strategies is mix. When little firm’s performance comes from indirect collaboration impacts (i.e. firms with low capability to realize indirect collaboration values), greater collaboration level (i.e. increasing collaboration usage) was positively associated with higher firm performance. This makes sense, in that, when the current IT does not support the realization of indirect collaboration values, improving the scope and penetration of collaborative IT enhance firm’s capability to realize indirect collaboration values. However increasing the usage of collaborative IT is not the only contributing factor to the performance of ICT standards. The negative lines with higher IDV might imply an adjustment cost or additional collaboration needs incur with the process of realizing indirect values, which inhibits the pursuit of higher collaboration level. This means that when companies can realize large indirect collaboration impacts, technology investment on increasing collaboration levels can

organization complimentarity may be more important to consider.

Interaction Effect of Collaboration Level and Indirect Value Impacts

0 2 4 6 8 10 Collaboration Level F irm P erfo rm an ce

Low Medium High

IDV=1 IDV=3 IDV=5 IDV=7

Figure 2. Interaction Effect of Collaboration Level and Indirect Collaboration Impacts

4.3 Value Focus under Alternative Collaboration Strategies

As discussed in Section 3, we propose that ICT standard creates three impacts on firm performance: technology, process, and extended supply chain relationship. Driven by the mission and strategy of the potential and existing PIP partners, organizations at different collaboration stages will have different views about these value impacts. Therefore, if we can find which impact can create more firm’s benefits under the concern of different collaboration strategies, individual organizations can develop different roadmaps to maximize its overall performance.

To find value focus for each collaboration strategy, we divided the data into three groups: adoption (with low to medium scope of sharing), adoption with high penetration level, and non-adoption. The regression results are presented in Table 3. We find that the values of the R2 for the three models are all above 0.8, suggesting that the value components can explain more than 80% of the variance of market performance. Conceptually, the models in the analysis can be represented by the following equations.

Firm performance (sample: group I) = α0 + β1 direct technology value + β2 indirect

technology value + β3 direct process value + β4 indirect process value

+ β5 relationship improvement + ε, (4)

Firm performance (sample: group II) = α0 + β1 direct technology value + β2 indirect

technology value + β3 direct process value + β4 indirect process value

+ β5 relationship improvement + ε, (5)

Firm performance (sample: group III) = α0 + β1 direct technology value + β2 indirect

technology value + β3 direct process value + β4 indirect process value

Table 3. Value Focus for Alternative Collaboration Strategies

Model Group I. Non Adopters

(n=12)

Group II. Adopters (n=21)

Group III. Adopters with high penetration (n=20) R2 0.941*** 0.857*** 0.892 Sig. F _{0.0000 0.0000 0.0000} Direct Technology Impact -0.435* -0.073 -0.239 Indirect Technology Impact -0.254* 0.054 0.142 Direct Process Impact -0.147 -0.293* -0.282 Indirect Process Impact 0.474 0.705** 0.634** Relationship Improvements 0.969*** 0.436 0.629***

* Note: Stage (I) sample of non-adopters, (II) sample of small to medium scope of sharing (less than 5 partners) at low penetration level (less than 10% transactions through PIPs), (3) sample of large scope of sharing at low to high penetration level (more than 5 partners and more than 10% transactions through PIPs)

The tests of group I focus on the significance of value impacts on firm performance when companies are non-adopters. We find a negative and significant relationship between direct technology impact and firm performance with a b value of -0.435 (p<0.1). The negative sign might imply a lag effect that makes the direct technology impact not immediately transferable to financial values. Indirect technology impact and relationship improvement have a positive and significant relationship with firm performance with b values of 0.474 (p<0.05) and 0.969 (p<0.01), respectively. Lastly, process impacts are insignificant to non-adopters. The b-values of –0.147 for direct process value and 0.254 for indirect process value are not significant. While the process impacts are not significant in non-adopter groups, the regression analyses of group II and group III show an opposite result. The b values for direct and indirect process impacts are -0.293 and 0.705 in group II, presenting a significant relationship with firm performance. For the group III, the indirect process impact and relationship improvement are positively and significantly related to the firm performance when the penetration level is high (b value is 0.634 for indirect process impact and 0.629 for relationship improvement; both have p value smaller than 0.01). The results support Hypothesis 4a.

For adopter groups, with the collaboration level increases (i.e. shifting from group II to group III), direct process impact becomes not significant with a b value of –0.281. On the other hand, relationship improvement becomes positively and significantly related to the firm performance with the b value of 0.629 (p <0.01), lending the support of Hypothesis 4b.

By examining substantive relationships of ICT standard impact measures to firm performance in the above section, we were empirically testing to see if the measures are consistent with theory. Such empirical assessment helps to establish nomological validity of the constructs (Zhu and Kraemer 2002). Together with the validity and reliability statistics discussed in section 4, we believe that the proposed valuation constructs for ICT standards are validated and they can be used for further studies such as exploring different impacts on the implementation of ICT standards, so companies are able to optimize values. The constructs can also be used as a starting point to investigate corporate readiness for ICT standards, so companies are able to develop roadmap for more values.

In addition, we have shown that improvement in extended supply chain relationships is the most beneficial impacts of ICT standards, and thus maintaining a good relationship with supply chain partners, as well as customers becomes more important than ever in this collaborative structure. The result supports our proposition to emphasize three areas of valuation in e-business IT: relations with supply chain partners, relations with customers, and interaction with markets, on the top of the traditional enterprise IT evaluation. Further, while much of the attention on IOS valuation has focused on its impact on direct benefits (i.e. business operations), our result has shown that there is a need to provide a generic valuation framework, which considers both direct and indirect benefits at the same time. In the information age competition, business success is not only based on the efficient allocation of financial and physical capital in order to achieve economies of scale and scope (i.e. aiming for direct benefits), but also the ability to mobilize and exploit softer and less tangible intellectual assets underlying IT-enabled collaboration. Considering the indirect benefits enables us to augment the traditional cost-benefit model with a strategic dimension, and thereby achieve higher level of firm performance.

Lastly, our study pertains to the relative importance placed on the benefits of ICT standards. Non-adopters primarily focus on technology value and relationship improvement, indicating that there is a need to improve technology capability and relationships before they are ready to adopt. On the other hand, adopters are those that are willing to invest in more expensive and complex systems. Such systems would not only improve the further diffusion of the systems, but also increase the likelihood of the process and relationship benefits described previously. After the technology has a broad scope of adoption, adopters would put more focus on relationship management to tie-in customers or partners via increasing penetration level of collaborative information technology. The observation that collaboration benefits varies significantly between adopter groups and non-adopter groups suggests the usefulness of measuring ICT standards based on different stages that drive the performance. While past IT literature (Lucas 1989) suggests that the business value of IT should show a performance gain correlated with the deployment of an IT, this research extends the existing literature and provides a new valuation approach that the future researchers can work on.

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附錄：該計畫已發表之研究成果

Chang, H. and Shaw, M., “Evaluating the Economic Impacts of IT-Enabled Supply Chain Collaboration,” Proceedings of the Eighth Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems, July 2004, Shanghai, China (第八屆亞太資訊系統會議) (論文題目：評估供 應鍊協同資訊系統之經濟效益)

Chang, H. and Shaw, M., “Developing a New Theory to Measure the Value of Supply Chain Collaboration,” The Second JAIS-Sponsored Theory Development Workshop, December 2003, Seattle, U.S.A. (國際資訊系統會議之第二屆理論創建研討會) (論文題目：建 立供應鍊合作績效評估的理論基礎)

計畫成果自評

This research aimed to develop a set of metrics for evaluating the economic impacts of ICT standards, which can be applied to examine the value of alternative e-business initiatives. The proposed framework views the economic impacts of ICT standards from three perspectives: relationship with trading partners (including suppliers and customers), business processes, and technology. The framework pertains three main features: (1) As traditional enterprise IT evaluation put its focus on process level, this valuation framework extends its focus to extended supply chain relationships, which include the relations with supply chain partners and with business customers to fully capture the value of ICT standards. (2) For each perspective, the framework consists of lagging indicators (indirect impacts) and complementary short-term performance measures (direct impacts). That is, the measures are derived from a top-down process driven by the corporate mission and strategies to ensure they do not only tell the story of past events but also contain the way of guiding or evaluating organizational performance. (3) The proposed framework extends the earlier work and ideas of past IT valuation research by considering the impact of corporate collaboration strategies in terms of different levels of collaboration. Therefore, given the same set of performance measures, organizations at different collaboration levels will have various value focuses, and thus they can develop different roadmaps to maximize overall performance.

Data was collected from 53 RosettaNet member companies. Through successive stages of testing and refinement, the proposed valuation framework satisfied necessary measurement properties with acceptable levels of reliability and validity. The result of 23-item economic impacts can serve as a foundation for further study in the field of ICT standards. The data analysis showed the importance of extended supply chain relationship on the firm performance. It highlights the need to consider relationship improvement on the top of traditional process analyses while considering the performance of collaborative IT. The result also demonstrates ICT standard brings the most indirect economic impacts on firm performance, which verifies the notion that the performance metrics design should be derived from a top-down process driven by the corporate mission and strategies; the corporate will then translate their mission and strategies into more direct objectives and measures. The analysis also verified that firms in different collaboration stages realize value in different ways. Adopters put more emphasis on process and relationship value while non-adopters place more importance on technology value. This finding implies that firms with different value focuses need different strategies to improve the performance of ICT standards.

Overall, this research possesses two major strengths. First, the proposed measures are generally applicable, as their reliability and validity are empirically verified. Second, the influence of corporate collaboration strategies have been incorporated into the valuation model,

allowing firms to gauge the most appropriate strategy and design roadmaps for achieving greater value of ICT standards. Researchers who are interested in measuring the value of ICT standards can apply this research to their studies in many ways. For those who believe other impacts are significant to their field could apply these value constructs in their studies and follow the suggested procedures to derive focus values. Large-scale cross-industry surveys can be especially appropriate for addressing this issue. Data collected from different industries would allow researchers to develop different impact constructs for specific industrial needs, compare the differences, and finally, more objectively assess the value of ICT standards.

Researchers could also conduct a longitudinal survey to develop the valuation metrics before firms implement ICT-enabled supply chain collaboration. They can then observe the development path and evaluate the changes of values during different development stages. Finally, we suggest that the study be applied in other IOS and IT as well. Additional economic impacts can be plugged into the model to make the valuation model more generally applicable to different technologies.