Abstract
This paper develops a theoretical framework for use in research investigating the impact of e‐commerce on the management of internal business processes. Managing the business processes that facilitate order fulfilment and delivery of goods and services supplied to customers is the prime concern of operations management. Despite the growing importance of e‐commerce to organizations of all types, e‐operations is a neglected area of study. Yet many of the problems associated with e‐commerce have centred on an inability to ‘deliver the goods’, often literally. Effective and efficient operations management is as important in e‐commerce as it is in traditional business. The framework, developed by integrating literature from the academic traditions of operations management and information systems, identifies three key issues: business process integration (the extent to which business processes for clicks and mortar e‐commerce are integrated with those for bricks and mortar), information systems integration (the extent to which intra‐ and inter‐organizational information systems are capable of communicating and sharing information with each other) and the operating context (types of customers, the e‐commerce business model and organizational factors). The framework is being used in case study‐based research that aims to describe and model current practice in organizations engaged in e‐commerce. The paper describes how the framework was applied in three financial services companies. The framework proved to be a useful basis for the research, enabling key emergent themes to be identified. However, in order to fully explain all of the research findings it was subsequently necessary to modify the framework to take account of the strategic context of each organization. The modified framework will be used as the basis of further case studies being conducted in organizations in other sectors. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.