TOWARDS A GENERAL MODEL OF THE B2B STANDARDS IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS Eva Söderström School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skövde Box 408, 541 28 Skövde, Sweden ABSTRACT Business-to-Business (B2B) standards enable organizations to coordinate and align their communication. The implementation of such standards is not a straight-forward and simple process. Even so, only little research exists so far in the area. Implementation is associated with various problems, much of which can be attributed to a general low level of knowledge about standards, their implementation, and use. This paper presents a general model for the B2B standards implementation process based on a combination of literature analysis and empirical data. The resulting implementation model consists of three main phases: preparation, architectural and consolidation, each of which having at least three sub- phases. The model can be used as a foundation for improving the planning of B2B standards implementation projects, and to improve implementation performance and the likelihood of success. It can thereby assist organizations in learning and in avoiding mistakes. KEYWORDS Business-to-Business, standards, implementation process 1. INTRODUCTION E-business – or Business-to-Business (B2B) – means the use of ICT to perform and automate business interactions within and between companies (Nurmilaakso et al, 2006). E-commerce, on the other hand, is focused on commercial transactions between companies and their customers (e-Business W@tch, 2005), whoever this customer may be. One path to succeeding with B2B is to use standards. A standard is a kind of “glue” enabling alignment and co-ordination of organizational communication (Söderström, 2004). It provides guidelines for how communication and information between organizations should be structured and managed. There is currently few research studies of how standards for e-business are being implemented and used. Quantz and Wichmann (2003) say this may depend on the fact that up to a few years ago, only little attention had been paid to standards at all. Implementing a standard includes all activities and actions taken to operate the standard in the inter-organizational communication. This is a complex issue, of which much is still unknown (Teo and Ranganathan, 2004; Jap and Mohr, 2002; Baghdadi, 2004). Thus, organizations still experience problems in spite of the advantages standards bring (Premkumar et al, 1994). Our research aims to develop a general model of the B2B standards implementation process. Such a model may lay a foundation for improved planning of B2B projects. As such, it may help organizations to avoid mistakes and to improve implementation performance. Chapter 2 presents the research approach, before the model is described in detail in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 summarizes the model, while chapter 5 consists of related work, and Chapter 6 makes concluding remarks. 2. RESEARCH APPROACH The research was designed using a combination of literature review of relevant sources, and empirical data collection. Literature sources were primarily scientific, complemented by descriptions in industry white papers, where specific focus was placed on descriptions of various implementation activities. IADIS International Conference e-Commerce 2008 151