THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGYAND INFORMATION-PROCESSING IN SMALL CANADIAN FIRMS

This study reports results obtained through a mail survey of 244 small business enterprises based in Quebec. Using results from past researc h based on information processing and information systems theory, we d istinguish between the provision of internal and external information. Analysis of the data shows that contrary to expectations, structural organicity interacts negatively with IT to explain the provision of in ternal information. The specific structural dimension that contributes to this interaction effect is horizontal differentiation. Both result s suggest that increasing deployment of IT improves the provision of i nternal information more rapidly when horizontal differentiation is lo w No such interaction effect was found to explain the provision of ext ernal information.