Conclusion

In this chapter the focus has been on institutional initiatives on diffusion of EDI in the Danish business community and the public sector. In our analysis we assessed the EDI Action Plan and found that an active use of the public sector was a dominant market demand driver in the diffusion of B2B e-commerce. Especially the attempt to streamline the internal processes in the public sector protrudes in the content of the EDI Action Plan. However, the lack of active industry involvement, apart from the business associations, stands out. Whereas the EDI Action Plan received active support from single public sector agencies and organizations, the plan had only indirect support from individual companies.

Mapping the degree of institutional involvement and the degree of EDI adoption, we found that most of the large users of EDI did not get involved in the EDI Action Plan. The majority of the institutions involved had limited market power and could be interpreted as the least-likely adopters of EDI. The market leaders and advanced EDI users were following their own e-commerce agenda, not paying particular attention to the goal of EDIFACT diffusion outlined in the EDI Action Plan.

Our interpretation of the analysis in this chapter is that the lack of direct representation will condition the future orientation and decision making in terms of current and future policy programs on diffusion of ICT: the lack of industry involvement has not made the outcome of the EDI Action Plan useless. Yet, it has led to a very limited adoption and diffusion of B2B e-commerce, especially among SMEs and public sector institutions, which were the target audience for the EDI Action Plan. The statistics indicate that it is the same industries that exchange more and more messages and types of messages (Andersen et al., 2000) and that large companies, which often are old and well established (Petersen et al., 2002) adopt ICT, regardless of campaigns initiated by institutions, as long as there is a potential for profit. Given these ex-post observations, the EDI Action Plan, with its focus on development of global standards for SMEs, is an attempt to obstruct the extensive use of proprietary standards introduced by those large companies, which hold the necessary power to set the EDI agenda.