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There is a growing recognition in the field of e‐government that improving the quality and impact of research requires taking into account their complex contexts and drawing on more interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Limited attention so far has been directed toward the conduct of such research, particularly in contract‐based research arrangements for developing e‐government policy. A four‐nation study of public e‐procurement policy is used here to make transparent the process of designing and conducting transdisciplinary and interactive research. Further sharing of research designs and accounts is needed to advance theory, policy, and practice, and to develop a history of ideas in the e‐government research field.

AbstractERP systems and those that support enterprise‐wide business activities such as eProcurement represent complex socio‐technical change.The imperative for researchers and practitioners is to identify ways of understanding and develop methods to assist in managing the complexity and messiness associated with the breadth and depth of change as the affordances of technologies and the needs of users emerge over time.In this paper theoretical concepts are presented and an empirical illustration of three cases of public eProcurement implementations is provided to make visible and make sense of the complex twists and turns of socio‐technical change.These experiences reveal the nuances of socio‐technical change, its fluid and emergent nature, the effect of unintended consequences, the role of influential agents and change in the representations of work practices.These theoretical concepts are analytically powerful and could provide practitioners with useful tools in understanding the envisaged and serendipitous nature of socio‐technical change and the intended and unintended outcomes that may emerge in implementing enterprise‐wide business information systems.Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

PurposeIdentifying the benefits arising from implementations of enterprise systems and realizing business value remains a significant challenge for both research and industry. This paper aims to consolidate previous work. It presents a framework for investigating enterprise systems benefits and business change, which addresses the identified limitations of previous research and provides a more detailed analysis of benefits and their contextual variation.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on data gathered from 31 real‐world organizations (case studies) of differing size, maturity, and industry sector, the study adopts an iterative content analysis to empirically derive a comprehensive benefits framework.FindingsThe content analysis provides a detailed classification of expectations and benefits, which is described in a four‐level framework. The four levels (areas) are further subdivided into aspects and criteria plus an attributed appraisal value. The resulting scheme for the "three‐level benefit codes" provides a greater level of detail about the nature of expected and realized benefits.Practical implicationsThe high level of detail and the code scheme comprising 60 different codes and the method for deriving the codes allows companies to identify and define benefits as well as to assess the outcome of enterprise systems implementation projects.Originality/valueThe paper empirically develops an applicable benefits framework, which addresses the lack of detail of previous frameworks.

Developing and sustaining a competitive advantage from the use of information technology is a topic of concern for information systems research. Mata et al. (1995) present a model that is founded on the resource-based view of the firm. The model is used to discuss factors that lead to competitive advantage in e-commerce companies. This paper explores factors that enable sustainable competitive advantages in B2C retailing. The analysis is based on a single in-depth case study of an Internet pioneer company (LeShop), which was observed by the authors since its inception more than 10 years ago. The research data stems from a series of interviews with managers at LeShop as well as two case studies about the company from two different points in time (2000 and 2009). LeShop is an online pioneer, which began selling groceries on the Internet in Switzerland in April 1998. After a turbulent few years, LeShop is now one of the few successful e-commerce suppliers in the supermarket segment worldwide. The discussion includes an analysis of further critical resources of the company from a resource-based view.