Using FAHP to Determine the Factors of Partner Selection—A Case on the “Bridging the Digital Divide of SME Project”

• Main Authors: Chien-Wei Chen, 陳建瑋
• Other Authors: Tzong-Ru Lee
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/09003834727864744650

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 電子商務研究所 === 96 === In Taiwan, the segregation exist between the large enterprises who can afford the Internet Technology and the SMEs who cannot forms the “digital divide” between these two groups of enterprises. To help the SMEs to bridge the difficulty in the adoption of IT, government in Taiwan implements a series of e-business project. “Bridging the Digital Divide of the SME Project” is one of them, which is implemented by the 12 e-business sub-contractor agencies and over 1,000 ISPs. In this research, we focus on the partner selection criteria of the 12 e-business sub-contractor agencies and ISPs in the “Bridging the Digital Divide of the SME Project”. Through literature review and interview with the experts who join this e-business project in practice, we develop two models to deal with our two research questions: 1) what the selection criteria for the 12 e-business sub-contractor agencies finding the cooperation partners (ISPs) in the “Bridging the Digital Divide of the SME Project” (for model 1); 2) what the selection factors that drive ISPs to find the capable SMEs implementing e-business (for model 2). FAHP is adopted to analyze the research data in two models. The results of the analysis in model 1 show that “ISP’s top management support to the alliance (x11)”, “both sides have similar motivation and objective to the alliance (x15)”, “manger’s communicating, operating, and managing capability (x23)”, “professional technique, capability to serve their customer, and the number of spots of ISP’s store (x24)”, and “ISP’s goodwill (x22)” are considered as important criteria for the e-business sub-contractor agencies to select the ISPs as their cooperative partners. On the other side, the analysis results in model 2 tell us that “trust between SME and ISP (y14)”, “support for cooperation from the internal of SME (y11)”, “SME’s ability to integrate company strategy and Internet functions (y13)”, “SME’s ability to manage and operate the business (y24)”, and “both sides have similar motivation and objective for cooperation (y15)” are determined as important factors for the ISPs to find capable SMEs for implementing e-business. Based on the results above, we provide suggestions to the government who want to implement e-business projects, the ISPs who want to join e-business projects, and the SMEs who want to join the e-business projects supported by the government.