(The) roles of partnerships and EDI adoption attitude in EDI implementation

Abstract

Recently, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is an important tool for electronic documents interchange between business partners instead of by writing and mailing them, so many companies have been interested in the successful EDI implementation with business partners. The formation of partnerships between firms is becoming an increasingly common way for firms to find and maintain competitive advantage. And the adoption of EDI in one firm can influence to the adoption decision in other firm. This research suggests that impact of partnerships and the impact of EDI adoption attitude should be considered when implementing and using EDI system with EDI adoption contingency approach. And this study focuses in the innovation diffusion perspective rather than the information system implementation perspective. The influencing factors on EDI implementation that were made manifest through previous studies are organizational factors, technological factors, and environmental factors. Hence, this research distinguishes itself from past researches on EDI implementation by the characteristics of partnership factors and research perspective. This study investigates partnership factors affecting EDI implementation with a moderating variable, EDI adoption attitude for analyzing the differences and the direct relation between EDI adoption attitude and EDI implementation. The result of the study is validated from data collected from a field study of 69 EDI user companies in Korea. Correlation analysis and moderated multiple regression are used to test the research hypotheses. The research model has implications for research and notice. The results confirm that partnership factors about partnerships have positive effect on the degree of EDI implementation. Finally, implications of the results on future extensions and managerial practice are highlighted at discussion and conclusion.