Abstract

Significant developments in IT and communications systems in the world specifically in recent decades have prompted under-developed countries to become sensitive to new opportunities and undertake an all-out planning to register a jump in their development and increase their economic and social growth in a bid to narrow their gap with developed countries and even vie with them. To that effect, e-commerce has been lent too much credence and our study here seeks to analyze the elements required for implementing e-business plans in small and medium-sized enterprises. To this end, we present a fuzzy map-based methodology in order to explore the most important critical success or failure factors for implementing e-business plan. Conducting an analysis on 61 indices bring us to the conclusion that factors like development, education and management of human resources, production scheduling, foreign relations management, communications systems and financial management are among the important critical failure factors.