MAKING EFFECTIVE THE INTRODUCTION OF E-BUSINESS IN SME: A REFERENCE MODEL APPROACH António Lucas Soares 1,2 , Luis Maia Carneiro 1 , Diana Carneiro 1 1 INESC-Porto, Rua José Falcão 110, 4150 Porto Portugal, 2 Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto, DEEC, Rua Roberto Frias, sn, 4200 Porto, Portugal asoares@inescporto.pt , lmc@inescporto.pt , diana@inescporto.pt This paper presents an approach to the identification of requirements for the implementation of e-business solutions in small and medium sized enterprises (SME). The approach is based on the so-called reference models whose main purpose is to guide the process of deriving the detailed requirements for business processes and information systems support, regarding e-business activities. Firstly, an overview of the particular aspects and main difficulties of the adoption of e-business by SME is presented. This overview justifies the methodology for the implementation of e-business in SME, developed within the EC funded project MEDIAT-SME, shortly described here. Next, it is focused a particular aspect of this methodology, the reference models approach, followed by an example of its application on a real SME. Finally, the advantages and difficulties of the approach are discussed. 1. ADOPTION OF E-BUSINESS BY THE EUROPEAN SME The past few years provided no definitive answers for the success of the Internet as a new business channel both on the Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business fields. Only for very few and specific products it was possible until now to achieve positive results and usually only for big ventures. Even in these specific situations like the selling of books or travel, the long-term profitability is not clear. On the B2B side even though it has been difficult to acquire new customers and implement new business models, there are many known success stories where huge advantages were achieved in terms of reducing costs, reducing time scales and increase quality, with the established business partners. It was also possible to differentiate from competition by providing customers with new services with real added value. It has been found by Boston Consulting Group (Davis and Gunby, 1999) that the unsuccessful ventures in e-commerce by traditional companies are due to the following factors: • Failure to do the essential analytical homework, • Insufficient breadth of vision with respect to potential e-commerce concepts, • Insufficient breadth of vision with respect to the Internet opportunity beyond e-commerce,