Nested Difference Tests for Examining Effects of Dependability on Enterprise Applications Success in E-Business

Electronic business (e-business) plays a major role in the modern economic network due to shorter cycle time and faster information transactions. Building enterprise applications that can coordinate activities, decisions, and knowledge cross many functions is a good solution for e-business. Hence, how to implement enterprise applications successfully has become an increasingly important management issue. Although information systems (IS) success has received fairly extensive attention from prior research, issues regarding whether service delivered by systems can be justifiably relied by users are seriously ignored, especially for complex systems like enterprise applications. Thus, this paper attempts to extend this kind of concept, perceived dependability, into the DeLone & McLean´s IS success model for exploring how it influences enterprise applications success. Results from a survey of 170 respondents taken from six international e-businesses in Taiwan strongly support that dependability is indeed an important factor for enterprise applications success. Additionally, over and beyond the effects of dependability on enterprise applications success, it can help practitioners and managers get deep insights about how to implement e-business successfully