STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ORGANISATIONAL AND E-BUSINESS STRATEGIES, READINESS, INTENSITY AND IMPACT IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

E-business promises substantial gains for educational institutions which can be realised only when they invest strategically in appropriate e-business resources and processes. Nigerian universities have been implementing various networked information resources to support their academics, administration and public outreach. However, they need to know how well their investments are helping to achieve these goals. Previous studies on e-business show that no known study was carried out on a comprehensive research on the readiness, intensity and impact of e-business implementation in Nigerian universities. This study, therefore, was designed to investigate interrelationships between organisational strategy, e-business strategies, e-business readiness, e-business intensity, and e-business impact in Nigerian universities. Technology, Organisation and Environment framework was the theoretical model while descriptive survey design was adopted. Stratified random sampling was used to select eighteen universities, comprising one federal, state and private, from each of the six geo-political zones. Data were collected on 2% and 5% of staff and students population respectively, totaling 4,476 students, 743 teaching, 1,498 non-teaching, 160 management and 90 Information Technology staff. A checklist and questionnaires were used to collect data on organisational strategy (OS), e-business strategy (ES), e-business readiness (ER), e-business intensity (EI) and e-business impact (EM). Data were subjected to frequency counts, t-test, Pearson product moment correlation and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) at 0.05 level of significance. Promoting teaching and learning was the most emphasised OS. Online portal, e-mail, e-library services were available to staff and students and the public. The highly intense activities include the provision of information online (100.0%) and advertisement of programmes, services and products (94.4%). This indicates that the universities were highly disposed to e-business operations but commitment of resources was low. There were no differences in the behaviour of the variables OS, ES, ER, EI and EM across the three types of university. Significant correlations were found between the variable pairs OS and ES (.51), ES and ER (.83) and ER and EI (.49), but not between EI and EM (.46). The estimated inner model of the PLS-SEM showed statistically significant hypothesised path relationships between variable pairs OS and ES (0.48), ES and ER (0.86), ER and EI iii (0.60), and EI and EM (0.43). The hypothesised path relationship between EM and OS was negative and not significant. The R2-value for the estimated PLS-SEM model was 0.46 which is higher than the threshold of 0.26. There were significant mean differences between the following pairs of variables: OS and ES (12.56), ES and ER (39.97), ER and EI (12.56) and EI and EM (7.43), indicating the outer model loadings. Only one out of the five Average Variance Extracted values is less than 0.50, confirming that there was convergent validity. Implemented e-business strategies in the universities strongly influenced e-business readiness and intensity of use of e-business resources, except e-business impact. University management need to better synchronise organisational objectives with their e-business strategies, readiness and intensity to promote greater transformative impact. Keywords: Organisational strategy, E-business operations, E-business resources, Nigerian universities Word count: 484