Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies
Communications of the ACM
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In our research, we examine the current state of internationalization in Finnish industries. As a consequence of structural changes in the world market and political changes in the European market, we see that there is a change going on within these industries. Firstly the industries have difficulties because of changed balances in worldwide competition. Secondly, the private companies within these industries have to compete more, whereas their means of competition have to be checked. The primary means of competition exist at the industrial level and in the national trading policies, but in our studies, we concentrate on individual organizations' possibilities to promote competition. In particular, we examine information systems as a means of competition and as a promoter for internationalization. In this paper, we view the problem through an individual trading effort, which begins with strategic management activities and ends with deliveries or with a continuous customer relationship. From this point of view, promoting competition means gaining new customers or new or renewed orders from old customers, which in our concern could be assisted by different kinds of information systems. The main types of promoting system are the information service systems, communication systems and data interchange systems. These have their specific roles in different phases of the trading process, but together they make a series of electronically supported activities, which we call electronic trade.