Culture, Industry or Structure? Comparing Organizational Web Site Development Strategy Across Industries and Cultures

The starting point for this paper is a comparison undertaken by Romm and Wong (1997) between two data sets focusing on the strategy of organizational web site design. The first data set, comprising two case studies, originally documented by Jarvenpaa and Ives (1996), was based on the computer industry in the US. The second data set, comprising one case study, was based on a university in Australia. Romm and Wong (1997) found that the strategy of organizational web design in the two data sets differed along a series of variables, leading the authors to conclude that the theory originally proposed by Jarvenpaa and Ives had to be modified to accommodate the Australian case. Given that the two case studies differed on both industry and national culture, Romm and Wong recommended that further investigations should be carried out within the Australian culture to determine whether organizational culture or industry differences were responsible for their findings. Following their recommendations, the present study was conducted on a second Australian university. The findings from this university demonstrated that structural attributes should be considered as explanatory variables for differences in organizational Web site design strategy.