Call for Paper Conference

E-Business Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for SMEs: Driving Competitiveness

A book edited by M. Manuela Cruz-Cunha and João Eduardo Varajão

------- http://mcruzcunha.com/ebusiness
------- ebusiness.book@gmail.com
-------


Dear Sir,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to the book "E-Business Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for SMEs: Driving Competitiveness" within your field of expertise related to the book topics.


------- Introduction
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Electronic business plays a central role in the economy, facilitating the exchange of information, goods, services, and payments. E-business is not exclusive to large enterprises. It propels productivity and competitiveness and is accessible to all enterprises, and as such, represents an opportunity also for SME competitiveness. Simultaneously, sophisticated systems like e-Marketplaces act as business integrators, potentiating business opportunities for both buyers and sellers.


------- The mission and overall objectives of this book
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The mission of this book is to discuss the main issues, challenges, opportunities, and solutions related to electronic business adoption, with a special focus on SME.
Electronic business will be addressed under the technological, organizational, and legal perspectives, in a very comprehensive way, aiming to disseminate current developments, case studies, new integrated approaches, and practical solutions and applications for SME.

The overall objectives are:
- To discuss the importance of e-business and its impact on SME competitiveness
- To discuss the importance of e-business systems and their support to new organizational models (networked, collaborative, virtual, knowledge-based, ubiquitous)
- To discuss drivers and barriers of e-business development
- To present practical solutions
- To introduce state-of-the-art technologies
- To discuss organizational and legal implications
- To discuss organizational preparedness
- To discuss critical success factors for its adoption by SME
- To discuss functionalities supported by e-business systems and business needs
- To discuss open source solutions
- To discuss adequateness of solutions to small and medium enterprises requisites and expectancies
- To discuss the future generations of e-business systems

The book is intended to support a professional audience of top managers and IT professionals (system developers and IT specialists) and also an academic audience (teachers, researchers, and students, mainly of post-graduate studies).


------- Recommended topics
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The book intends to collect the most recent developments on the organizational, technological, and legal dimensions of electronic business, and to discuss its potential, impact, trends, and challenges particular to SME. It is intended to cover the following aspects:

1. The organizational aspect, covering:
- New business models
- Business strategies
- Enterprise engineering
- Enterprise integration
- Development of e-procurement
- Development of e-marketing
- Development of e-commerce
- Critical success factors
- Performance indicators
- Subcontracting, partnerships, networks, and virtual organizations
- Extent of e-business use and level of preparedness of SMEs

2. The technological dimension, addressing:
- Emerging solutions
- Ontologies and taxonomies
- Information and application integration
- Evaluation and selection
- Payments
- Privacy and security

3. Legal aspects, covering:
- Contractualization
- Jurisdiction
- Protection against leakage of knowledge
- Regulatory aspects


------- Submission Procedure
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Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before May 31, 2009, a 1-2 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter. This proposal should be sent in Word format to ebusiness.book@gmail.com.
LaTex files cannot be accepted.

Authors will be notified within one week about the status of their proposals.
Authors of accepted proposals will be sent guidelines to prepare the full chapter (7,000 – 10,000 words) and will have three months after notification to submit the full chapter.
All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis by two or three reviewers.

This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the "Information Science Reference" (formerly Idea Group Reference), "Medical Information Science Reference" and "IGI Publishing" imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This publication is anticipated to be released in 2010.


------- For more detailed information, please visit
------- http://mcruzcunha.com/ebusiness