| Περίληψη: | Extensive investments are made for the development of various types of information systems (IS) interoperability technologies, and also for their implementation at firm level. This necessitates the systematic study of the business value that IS interoperability technologies generate. However, quite limited empirical research has been conducted on this. Our study contributes to filling this research gap by presenting an empirical study of the effect of the adoption of three types of IS interoperability standards (industry-specific, XML-horizontal and proprietary ones) on the business benefits firms gain from their information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructures. It is based on a large dataset from 14.065 European firms (from 25 countries and 10 sectors) collected through the e-Business W@tch Survey of the European Commission. For all these three types of IS interoperability standards it has been concluded that their adoption for establishing IS interoperability with cooperating firms (suppliers, business partners, customers) increases the business benefits gained from firm’s ICT infrastructure, both the cost reduction and the sales growth related ones. A comparison among these three types of IS interoperability standards shows that their positive effects on the ICT business benefits differ, with the industry-specific standards having the strongest effects, which are of similar magnitude with the ones of the degree of development of firm’s internal IS (widely recognized as the main determinants of these benefits). Furthermore, we have found that the adoption of industry-specific standards is particularly important for realizing sales growth related benefits from firm’s ICT infrastructure. |
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English