The Adoption of Standardised Technology in the Automotive Industry Martina GERST 1 , Raluca BUNDUCHI 2 University of Edinburgh, RCSS, High School Yards, Edinburgh, EH1 1LZ, Scotland 1 Tel: +44 (0)1316514098, Fax: +44 (0)1316506399, Email: Martina.Gerst@ed.ac.uk 2 Tel: +44 (0)1316506396, Fax: +44 (0)1316506399, Email: R.Bunduchi@ed.ac.uk Abstract: The paper explores the factors that shape the development and implementation of a standardised portal technology in the automotive industry. The social shaping of technology theory guides the case study research to unveil the interaction between the array of socio-economic factors that shape this process. The pressure for collaboration and cost reductions that characterise the automotive industry, together with political issues surrounding the standardisation process, the nature of the technology and the social characteristics of the context in which the standardised technology is developed and implemented shape the standardisation process and explain its outcomes. 1. Introduction The use of Internet technologies facilitates the creation of networks of relationships within the supply chain that provide organisations with access to key strategic resources that could not have been otherwise obtained [1]. As a result, Internet technologies appear to play a significant role in the Business-to-Business (B2B) arena. Even before the advent of the Internet, the use of information technology (IT) has been claimed to lead to a tighter coupling between buyer and supplier organisations [2], allowing organisations to integrate their various business processes and enabling the formation of vast networks of inter- organisational relationships [3]. Nevertheless, such claimed integration effects requires interoperability between IT systems, which can not be achieved in the absence of common IT standards. For pre-Internet IT, the dominant standard in the area of B2B commerce was the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). However, the use of EDI was associated with the high costs and low flexibility, whereas the Internet based standards such as XML were claimed to be cheap, open and flexible. Therefore, with the advent of Internet technologies, the major efforts concentrate around the open XML related standards. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of a standardised Internet technology project – a portal - in the automotive industry. The aim of the study is to unveil the factors that have led the decision to adopt the standardised technology, and have shaped the following implementation process. The paper is structured as follows: the theoretical approach that guides the empirical analysis is briefly discussed in section 2. The rest of the paper focuses on the case study, identifying the factors that shape the development and implementation of the standardised portal technology in relation to the context in which these processes occurs. A summary of findings and lessons learnt conclude this paper. 2. The theoretical approach to the study of development and implementation of standardised Inter-organisational systems (IOS) The social shaping of technology (SST) perspective is adopted in this study because of its conceptualisation of technological processes as resulting from the interaction between an array of socio-economic factors [4]. Such a conceptualisation matches the objective in this