ELECTRONIC COMMERCE: EMERGING PATTERNS AND STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS

Advances in information technologies enable firms to expand electronic commerce - the exchange of valuable information, goods and services across electronic media. This paper looks at how businesses are adopting and using technologies like the Internet and World Wide Web for electronic commerce. I propose that electronic commerce will dramatically reduce transactions costs requiring managers to re-develop their firm's strategy to focus on more fundamental sources of competitive advantage. I identify responses required to compete in a low transactions cost environment and provide illustrative examples of firms executing such a strategy.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

BUSINESS STRATEGY IN THE WIRED WORLD: COMPETING FOR MARKET LEADERSHIP AND MIND SHARE

This paper examines how firms use the Internet and the emerging "global infostructure" to improve key processes and competitive capabilities. It proposes the widespread diffusion of the emerging "infostructure" will dramatically reduce transaction costs, leading to growth in electronic commerce and productivity while reducing the profit opportunities of inefficient firms. In this wired world characterized by low transaction costs and noisy environments, firms will have to re-focus their strategies to achieve market leadership and capture mind share for competitive advantage. To achieve market leadership firms must seek advantage from economies of scale, scope, or externalities. Alternatively they must differentiate themselves through unique merchandise and innovation or develop specialized customer relations. To capture mind share firms must develop integrated cross media marketing programs. These programs will push products through various online or related promotions or develop strong brand identities for products. Thus this paper identifies competitive issues in a wired world and outlines various foci for strategic responses to the above challenges.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

TRENDS IN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE SECURITY: A MANAGERIAL BRIEF AND TEACHING NOTE

The Internet and similar networks provide new infrastructures for communications and commerce. These open networks interconnect computers across many different organizations with dramatically lower communications and distributed applications development costs. This motivates businesses to transfer commercial activity from closed private networks to open networks like the Internet. However, open network architectures are vulnerable to a number of different security threats. While many different hardware and software solutions exist to secure transactions over the Internet, greater consensus is required by companies and consumers on the processes, organizations and application of existing technical solutions for secure electronic commerce. Greater consensus on security among trading parties will lower the costs of electronic commerce and accelerate its deployment on the Internet.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

PRE-COORDINATION + POST-COORDINATION = THE CASE FOR PARTIAL COORDINATION

The introduction of computerized post-coordination has solved many of the problems of pre-coordinated subject access. However, the adoption of computerized post-coordination results in the loss of some precoordination benefits. Specifically, the effect of hiding terms within the context of others is lost in post-coordination which gives lead status to every document term, This results in spurious matches of terms out of context. Library patrons and Internet searchers are increasingly dissatisfied with subject access performance, in part because of unmanageably large retrieval sets. The need to enhance precision and limit the size of retrieval sets motivates this work which proposes partial coordination, an approach which incorporates the advantages of computer search with the ability of precoordination to limit spurious partial matches and thereby enhance precision.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

The Edgar Internet Project: Web Application Development Considerations

This paper describes the implementation of World-Wide Web (WWW) access of the SEC EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Archiving and Retrieval) data base. EDGAR is a large, heterogeneous financial data archive that has been available to Internet users since January 1994. It is composed of all forms filed electronically to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by domestic publicly traded corporations and mutualfunds. We describe WWW design decisions and problems encountered in implementing a public access system to a large database. Our current applications include: an object-oriented mutual fund equity holdings database, a structured full text index search oncorporate profiles, and real-time graphical visualization of stock price and mutual fund position changes

Outsourcing of Information Systems as a Strategy for Organizational Alignment and Transformation

Outsourcing of services is usually viewed as a way to increase or decrease capacity at the margin. By outsourcing a firm can vary its ability to provide goods or services such as information technology (IT) processing capacity or applications development, without taking on the long term commitment of permanent staff or equipment Today, outsourcing provides new options for managers to provide information technology infrastructures and services to a firm. In this paper we identify ways in which outsourcing may be used tactically to better align business and information technology strategies. Specifically, we consider how selective outsourcing enables alignment of incentives, business revenues and IT infrastructure costs, and how organizational intent can be made more consistent with a firm' s capabilities. We propose that outsourcing as an information systems management strategy can enable better control and lower agency costs as managers benefit from better information through external benchmarking. We also consider the role of outsourcing as a vehicle to support major organizational transformation, and as a device for enabling new models of organization. Based on our analysis we propose a series of testable propositions about outsourcing. The contributions of this paper include extension of business strategy and information technology alignment concepts to incorporate the interdependence between projects, product life cycles, and technology transfer. Most importantly, the paper highlights new directions for outsourcing research, focusing on the effects of outsourcing on the IT organization, the processes of internal technology development and the transfer of technologies between organizations.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Learning From Experience: Managerial Interpretations of Past and Future Information Technologies

This paper reports the results of an empirical study that examines how n~tnagers\u27 experiences with a specific strategic information technology in their industry influences cognitive managerial tasks associated with new information technologies. Specifically, we sought to assess the relationships of positive and negative experiences with managers\u27 flaming of new information technologies as threats or opportunities for their firms, and with their perceived uncertainty about how to respond to new information technologies. We undertook this study in the tax preparation and f\u27tling industry and examined how managerial perceptions of new information technologies were shaped by managers\u27 previous experiences with electronic filing technology for tax returns

PARTIAL COORDINATION: A PRELIMINARY EVALUATION AND FAILURE ANALYSIS

Partial coordination is a new method for cataloging documents for subject access. It is especially designed to enhance the precision of document searches in online environments. This paper reports a preliminary evaluation of partial coordination which shows promising results compared with full text retrieval. We also report the difficulties in empirically evaluating the effectiveness of automatic full-text retrieval in contrast to mixed methods such as partial coordination which combine human cataloging with computerized retrieval. Based on our study we propose research in this area will substantially benefit from a common framework for failure analysis and a common data set. This will allow information retrieval researchers adapting "library style" cataloging to large electronic document collections, as well as those developing automated or mixed methods, to directly compare their proposals for indexing and retrieval. This paper concludes by suggesting guidelines for constructing such a testbed.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

The Impact of Interactive Behavior Modification on Equilibrium Price and Seller Location in Electronic Markets

This paper investigates the impact of seller introduced inference systems designed to modify buyer behavior on an electronic market. In particular, the focus of our analysis is on real time systems that seek to infer buyer preferences and reservation prices based on buyer behavior. We show that under certain conditions, when an inference engine is introduced, the equilibrium price falls and the total surplus of the market increases. We will employ the technique of closed form equations to model these phenomena and interpret the solutions and relate the results to current trends in electronic commerce