Electronic Business and Commerce Components - Thesis Proposal Example

http findyourdeal.com/ Table of Contents http findyourdeal.com Table of Contents 2 3 The IS Business Foundation 3 3.2. Electronic Businessand Commerce components 6 1.3 Decision Support Components 8 References 10 3.1. The IS Business Foundation Findyourdeal.com is an e-commerce website, and hence Information Science will play a critical role in the success of the project as compared to a traditional business where IS/IT is more of an enabler rather being a key component. Being a technology enabled company; we will need the usual office infrastructure that will ensure 24 hours high speed internet connectivity. Achieving this goal will require high speed internet connectivity from an ISP, required number of PCs/Laptops, networking components like wireless routers and office accessories like desktop printer and a desktop scanner. Specifications for all these components are standardized and are available off the shelf in any computer store or an e-commerce website. We will extensively use open source software applications to run our IS resources. Most of the open source software applications are royalty free, and hence will shoot down our costs. Some examples of free and open source applications will be Ubuntu as the operating system, Open Office as the general productivity suite, Mozilla Firefox/Google Chrome as the browser, GIMP as photo editor. We will outsource annual maintenance contracts to local hardware providers, thereby nullifying the requirement of any dedicated manpower for maintenance of hardware resources at out office. We will also employ freelance technical help personnel from lower cost economies to drive down our software maintenance costs. At Findyourdeal.com, we aim to aggregate traffic and content. Our core business activities will be as follows: 1. Aggregate deals from companies: To keep costs down in the initial phase, we will use the internet to scout for deals being offered by companies. Sourcing of deals may be done through 3 distinct processes: a. Identifying and aggregating deals by using an online program like a parser b. Identifying and aggregating deals by manually scanning through websites of target company websites c. Directly contacting the companies 2. Upload the content into the database/content management system 3. Management and promotion of the website Figure 1: IS component, business functions and Critical Success Factors IS Component Business function Critical success factors IT Office Infrastructure Aggregating deals from companies Fast, interrupted Internet connection Functional IT hardware Well managed intra office network Normal office activity Fast, interrupted Internet connection Functional IT hardware Well managed intra office network Web server Hosting of our website High bandwidth 99.99% uptime High security assurance Sufficiently powerful hardware CMS/e-commerce system Revenue Good design Useful and relevant content Good User Experience (Source: Author’s Creation) 3.2. Electronic Business and Commerce components E-commerce businesses range from a multibillion dollar business like Amazon, to really small mom-and-pop-managed kind of a website that generates not more than$5000 revenues in a month. The set of features required in an e-commerce website obviously depends on the present status of an e-commerce business, and also perhaps on the future growth potential. The very basic e-commerce system will have the following components – 1. A device with Internet access on the client side 2. A web server, and 3. E-commerce software. While the initial two components are common place, it selecting appropriate e-commerce software that will be a critical activity. Available e-commerce systems may be categorized using a whole lot of parameters like, Open source / Proprietary, Off-she Shelf/Custom made, Microsoft Technologies/LAMP based or Product/SaaS. Every available e-commerce component have its own utility and caters to a specific set of customers, we have chosen to use LAMP based open source e-commerce systems for our business. LAMP is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, and majority of all FOSS (FOSS) free and open source software applications are built of LAMP technologies. Benefits of LAMP based open source software applications: FOSS applications score on 3 major points over proprietary software applications, mainly 1. Access to codes: Open source software applications give full access to the code, and that makes it possible to customize the software as per business requirements, and also add new features. This throws open a whole lot of possibilities of tweaking an established software application to suit individual business requirements. Since we will be a start up, we will require maximum flexibility to ensure we can change or tweak our e-commerce system to address challenges that may crop up. We would also require flexibility to ensure we are always ahead of our competition in terms of offering innovative features to our visitors. 2. Cheaper prices: Open source software applications are generally free and involve no royalty. Most of the open source e-commerce systems like shopping carts, comment management systems and customer relationship tracking software applications come with no royalty, thereby making it extremely cheap. Any amount saved while building our e-commerce system can in turn be ploughed back in to resource intensive activities like marketing and advertisement. 3. Strong community support: Open source software applications tend of have a strong community of developers. This results in availability of a bigger pool of freelance expert developers who may be available for custom development projects. This community support is notably important as this leads to availability of a whole range of add on plug-in/widgets, either free or at a nominal cost. For example, there are literally thousands of free themes available for FOSS shopping carts like osCommerce, Zencart or Magento (Pfaff, 1998). 1.3 Decision Support Components Decision support system is more of a concept rather than an actual process, and there has been various definitions capturing the essence of a DSS. A simplified definition of DSS may be - “Decision support systems are interactive, computer-based systems that aid users in judgment and choice activities. They provide data storage and retrieval but enhance the traditional information access and retrieval functions with support for model building and model-based reasoning” (Druzdzel & Flynn, 2002, p.6) Decision support systems are the key to any organization, more so in the case of a start up where the organization has to be extremely nimble so that it can capture customer trends and reassess its strategies accordingly. With the advent of Internet, it becomes all the more easier and convenient to capture visitor response and extract meaningful actionable insights from this data. Just like an organization, decision support systems evolve along with the organization. While companies like Apple that reach out to millions of customers through the web, mobile and brick-mortar stores and have a supply chain that closely binds manufacturing/logistics activities across various vendors and continents will require an extremely robust and complex decision support system, a start up like our will require a significantly simpler DSS in the initial stage. Our decision support system will primarily consist of 2 phases – user/visitor data capture, and analyzing the data to derive meaningful actionable insights. It is quite evident that our most important source of data will be the Internet. We will need to understand how visitors reach our website, what they search for in our website and most importantly, how they use our website to identify the best deal for themselves. There are a range of web analytics tools, both free as well as paid. Among the best known web analytics tools are Google Analytics, Yahoo Analytics, Alexa and Omniture. We propose to use Google Analytics suite to capture user data. Google Analytics if a free web analytics tool offered by the leading search engine, Google, and is one of the most frequently used and admired web analytics tool. It offers a range of tools that help webmasters capture and segregate data as per business needs. Given we are a start up and will be just launching our website, commonly available spreadsheets like MS Excel or Open Office Calc will be our choice for a DSS software. While Google Analytics can capture almost all kind of revenant data required for a web based business, spreadsheets like MS Excel or OpenOffice Calc may be used to analyze the data. References Druzdzel, M.J. & Flynn, R.R. (2002). Decision Support Systems. Retrieved October 12, 2011 from http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/psfiles/dss.pdf. Pfaff, B. (1998). Why open source software is better for society than proprietary closed source software. Retrieved October 12, 2011 from http://www.stanford.edu/~blp/writings/anp/oss-is-better.html. Read More