Preface BACKGROUND TO E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS AND THEIR IMPACT ON PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ORGANIZATIONS

Defining the impact of e-business applications in a multi-disciplinary field with cross industry contexts has its own challenges. In this book, our attempts to compile a book started from the diversity on the use of e-business applications. In our own research on the use of technology in higher education and the automotive industry, we have seen that the impact of e-business applications may vary between industries and sometimes in organizations within the same industry in which it has taken place. In our literature review about the impact of e-business technologies on organizations, we have observed that there were accounts of e-business applications, useful cases indicating why e-business application implementations fail or succeed, but the absence of cases compiled under one roof prompted us to write this book. As editors, we have not sought to predefine the contextual setting or the area of impact, nor provide a certain definition or area of interest; the only boundaries we set forth were the assessment of e-business applications and the impact on organizations. The purpose of this book initially was twofold: to assess the impact of e-business, and to provide two distinctive angles between private and public organizations. However, having looked at our contributors coming from 10 different countries with a wide array of e-business applications and implications on diverse organizations, we decided to group them into industries, and within them provided a public and private division. We believe that the changes reflected in the edited book provided a more richer picture and a chest of resources with concepts which may have already been published in various journals, but many of the perspectives are new, which makes this book both suitable for practitioners and academics at the same time. Twenty-four authors have contributed to this book, which are operating as either practitioners or academics in the fields, who are involved with various aspects of the impacts of e-business applications and strategies.