SMe-business" - Strategies for success

The World Wide Web (WWW)provides unique opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to build effective global infrastructures in at least three ways. First Internet-based infrastructures are relatively cheap; requiring significantly reduced capital investments over proprietary networks. Second, they provide an ever converging and rich environment for effective business networking and inter-organisational process management. Third, they provide SMEs with access to a greatly expanded consumer market through electronic business (e-business). In order to exploit these advantages in a global strategy, the SME needs to adopt an entirely different approach to management that can enable it to deploy an extensive infrastructure network based on shared resources with other firms. This paper presents such a framework and provides a new perspective to strategic infrastructure management in SMEs and to electronic business research. The framework is supported by a number of case examples of SMEs in the global context.