"It is also important that the share of costs and risks born by the trading partner are seen to be in proportion to the share of benefits they receive," McCabe said.

Duplicating business processes must be avoided at all costs, he said, as this was the strongest and most universal theme of all.

He said asking businesses to re-key or handle the same data twice kills a project although this is very common.

On the flip side, consolidating or eliminating trading processes makes an e-business system much more likely to be adopted.

One example is integrating e-business systems with financial software packages which small trading partners use.