Development and Use of Web-Based Information Systems

Since CERN released the WorldWide Web in 1991 the pace of development of the technology and its usage has been extreme. The technology was—and still is—fairly simple, but the technical ideas and the concepts for information exchange have opened for completely rethinking information systems and businesses. The success might be found in the fact that protocols, services, standards and mark up languages are sufficiently advanced to provide useful support, and at the same time sufficiently simple to be widely adopted (Braa et al. 2000). The result is a general interaction technology providing a standardized platform and an enormous number of standard components and applications. The advantages combined with the potentials are significant. Today the web-technology has matured enough to become an attractive platform for business applications and organizational information systems. Many organizations are increasing their investment in web-based information system resources, such as electronic commerce, intranets and extranets. This trend has been so strong that highly esteemed IS scholars have suggested that IS researchers should drop research approaches and topics that do not address the internetwork architecture, e.g., Lyytinen et al. (1998).