The Diversity and Penetration of EDI in Austria: An Empirical Analysis

This work has been finished in February 2011.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is still one of the key challenges of today’s businesses. Currently, there exist several ways of handling EDI between companies. The prevalent technology in use is still EDIFACT. However, with the inception of XML, new standards are on the rise. Either way, numerous standards and message format implementations lead to services that fail to communicate with each other. Hence, interoperability is bound to fail.

Before we can actually try to solve such interoperability issues, we need to have in-depth knowledge about the penetration and the diversity of electronic business document formats and standards. Therefore, an empirical study shall be conducted for the Austrian market, in which data on the usage of EDI is gathered and statistically analyzed to serve as valuable input for further research in this area.

Tasks in the master’s thesis include: