E-business adoption in Iranian small and medium enterprises: Analyzing and prioritizing the extra-organizational factors

The main purpose of this research is to investigate and prioritize the extra-organizational e-business adoption factors among Iranian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The research is structured around the two dimensions of extra-organizational or exogenous factors. These dimensions are environmental factors (a set of economical, political, social, legal and market/industry issues) and technological factors (E-business technologies characteristics). After conducting an in-deep literature review and eliciting the potential adoption factors, we used a combination of the modified Delphi and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methods to explore the most important extra-organizational factors and ascertain their relative importance in expert´s view. Results indicate that the effect of environmental factors on E-business adoption by Iranian SMEs is greater than technological factors. In the category of environmental factors, customer demand and supplier/partner pressure have the most impact, whereas the existence of supportive rules have the least effect on using E-business. The study also shows that in the category of technological factors, implementation and maintenance cost of E-business rank last, while compatibility and awareness of potential benefits (relative advantages) of E-business are the most important adoption factors in Iranian SMEs.