The benefits of an e-business performance measurement system

This chapter investigates how organizations have been adapting their performance measurement practices in response to their adoption of e-business in their business operations. It aims to identify the features and benefits of an effective e-business performance measurement system. Twelve organizations known to have had some success in developing performance measurement systems suitable for the online environment were studied. The researchers found that these organizations adopted an incremental rather than a radical approach to changing their performance measurement system for e-business, thereby avoiding the costs and disruption associated with the introduction of more complex performance metrics. Secondly, they eschewed the use of best practice recipes (such as the balanced scorecard). The study concludes that although these results may be at odds with the prescriptive generic performance measurement literature, they may be appropriate for the current state of development of e-business

An initial examination of free and proprietary software-selection in organizations

This article presents the findings of a study concerning organisational software-selection in the context of proprietary and 'Free Software'. Proprietary software with its inherent benefits and drawbacks remains dominant over Free Software in many business contexts. In contrast, the arrival of disruptive approaches to applying technology, such as cloud-computing, almost certainly mandates a heterogeneous software environment. However, this paper abstracts to the organisational context, as opposed to solely concentrating on the technical aspects, so that broader issues surrounding both proprietary software and Free Software adoption are brought into focus and may provide academics and practitioners with insight into what many would consider an information technology-centric matter. Contemporary multi-disciplinary literature addressing the areas of software-selection methodology, architectures for service delivery, and software types, are combined with recent findings from primary research in order to draw initial conclusions on the current state of software-selection in organisations