38P.MAMS : a unified approach for assessing e-readiness of SMEs

ICT adoption to facilitate business processes is a growing trend in today’s global environment. As SMEs play an important role in a country’s economy, they cannot lag behind in ICT adoption. In order to join the e-business bandwagon, SMEs need to understand the barriers in the path and the benefits offered by e-business adoption. This paper has reviewed the extant literature of barriers, benefits of e-business adoption before proposing some key enablers that facilitate the adoption. Six existing e-readiness tools that are used globally to measure e-readiness are also reviewed. The review of different aspects of e-business readiness has motivated their unification and the definition of an holistic framework (Motivation Application Measurement Support e-readiness framework). The MAMS framework can be utilized as a reference to assess, design and implement a supplementary strategic approach for e-business readiness of SMEs.