Electronic commerce: a best practice perspective

Citation

Al-Mashari, M.A. (2002), "Electronic commerce: a best practice perspective", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 9 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bij.2002.13109baa.001

Electronic commerce: a best practice perspective

Guest Editor Majed A. Al-Mashari is based at the Department of Information Systems, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Electronic commerce: a best practice perspective

The increasing forces of intensifying global competition, continuing customer demands, and the significant revolution in digital communication technologies have together put pressure on many organisations to switch their operations into the e-business world by making use of electronic commerce (EC) technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) as media for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. This process potentially facilitates the expansion and development of new linkages among various business partners around the globe. It also speeds up information flow and enables information and knowledge sharing with other entities in a "boundaryless" business supply chain.

As the widespread application of EC continues, the need for a new research agenda to address the various issues in this context has never been more urgent. Having EC repeatedly top of the list of themes in major academic information systems (IS) conferences reflects the dire need for research in this rapidly emerging field. The following list highlights the major streams of EC research:

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  Business design/architecture for EC application.

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  E-transaction security and risk mitigation.

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  Techniques of consumer behavior analysis in the EC context.

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  Web-enabled business process improvement.

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  E-business knowledge management.

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  Web-based marketing strategies and models.

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  Corporate strategic planning for EC adoption.

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  EC performance metrics.

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  Web-based system analysis and design.

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  Investment/evaluation process.

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  EC-induced supply chain management.

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  EC and organizational change management.

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  Socio-technical infrastructure for EC.

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  Global issues of EC application.

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  EC and competitiveness.

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  Success and failure in EC implementation.

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  EC in IS curricula.

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  Methodological aspects of EC research.

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  Critical success/failure factors.

The aim of this special issue is to offer researchers and practitioners a good understanding of the aforementioned issues involved in the application of EC technologies in various domains and business sectors. BIJ has been pioneering in promoting and disseminating "best practices" relating to various IT and business aspects. It is on this premise that this issue is expected to provide both academics and practitioners with a frame of reference with which they can reposition their EC experiences based on well-established best practices. The articles appearing in this issue provide conceptual and analytical models, strategic frameworks, surveys, and case studies focusing on the tools/techniques, justification, design and implementation of EC systems.

The special issue starts with an interesting article by Jeffcoate et al., describing how small businesses involved in EC can benchmark their performance against a number of CSFs. The authors propose an approach that is based on a series of interviews carried out amongst small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) whose activities were judged to represent best practice in EC. The approach adopted encourages an SME to analyse its strengths and weaknesses on a continuing basis and to compare them with those of its competitors. The first step in this process is identifying the company's attitude to growth. Second, the SME needs to establish a suitable generic strategy and decide on a set of objectives that support it. Finally, it has to identify a set of relevant CSFs. The study shows that the KITE interviews identified 11 CSFs relevant to the competitive performance of SMEs entering the e-commerce market. The paper suggests several areas for future research, particularly through follow-up studies to validate this approach.

McCormack and Kasper argue that the realities of today's digital economy are requiring and enabling dramatically improved levels of supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. Their article describes definitions and measures of the extended supply chain construct and reviews the results of an ongoing benchmarking research study completed in cooperation with the US and European Supply Chain Councils. This study found that Internet usage is just beginning in both the USA and Europe, and it has significant relationships to cross-company (B2B) integrating practices that are seen as key components of the extended supply chain and supply chain management performance.

In their article, Kamel and Hussein report on Egypt's experience with EC adoption. The paper describes how a developing country with an economy in transition started to invest in building its communication and information technology infrastructure since 1985 as a vital tool for development. The paper also illustrates the emergence of EC in Egypt, with a particular focus on the challenges faced that relate to a number of social, technological, financial and legal issues. Furthermore, the paper describes the road map formulated in collaboration between the government and the private sector to diffuse EC in Egypt.

With recent attention being focused more on integrating EC with enterprise application integration technologies, Themistocleous and Irani believe that one of the main motivations associated with the adoption of EC is the integration and automation of business processes. Their article shows that organisations maximise their benefits from the adoption of EC through integrating their existing information systems and therefore automate their business processes. However, for many years the integration of systems has been a barrier to business process automation, with no single integration solution available to piece together all types of systems and thus solve all integration problems. This turns attention to a new generation of software called application integration (AI) which addresses integration problems more efficiently and leads to more flexible and maintainable solutions. Regardless, confusion surrounding terminology in the integration area has led to a debate regarding the capabilities of AI, as each term and definition proposes a different range of AI technologies. There appears, therefore, a clear need to clarify this confusion that will allow others to define better the range of AI technologies in terms of types of systems and scope. In doing so, the authors propose a novel taxonomy that is based on the critical analysis and evaluation of existing case studies extrapolated from the AI literature. The novelty of the taxonomy centres on the synthesis of a comprehensive set of systems that efficiently describe the range of AI technology in terms of application. It is expected that the taxonomy presented will allow developers and integrators to navigate better through the portfolio of integration technologies and, therefore, better understand the integration area. It might also be used as a tool for decision making as managers will be able to realise the capabilities of AI.

In their article, Kolokotronis et al. argue that the decentralized nature of Web-based information systems demands a careful evaluation of the pantheon of security issues in order to avoid the potential occurrence of business risks that could not be easily mitigated. They explain that information security is not merely a technical solution implemented at each endpoint of the inter-organizational application. Their paper, therefore, describes an integrated approach based on a rigorous multi-level and multi-dimensional model. Having as a starting point the overall business goals and objectives, the model presented drives the development of a strategy from the lower levels of business processes. The authors demonstrate its use and applicability over "Billing Mall" – a system for electronic bill presentation and payment.

Al-Mashari argues that more and more organizations are switching to online business to achieve better positions in the digital-based competitive market. His article describes the process of EC as complex in nature, involving changes to business models and procedures. It studies this new business phenomenon based on the experience of the organizations that have embarked on EC-induced business change initiatives. The paper presents initial analysis of a number of reported case studies of successful EC application. The paper uncovers the driving forces behind EC application, the approaches and methods adopted and the key critical factors that contribute to the success of the initiatives.

Finally, Power and Sohal believe that changing competitive environments and technological innovation have been increasingly driving organizations to look to deriving competitive advantage through the management of their total supply chain. In their article, they present ten case studies which have been conducted in organizations using the European Article Numbering (EAN) system for the application of business-to-business e-commerce. They found that those organizations which implement this system for EC with trading partners from a "strategic" stance can reap substantial benefits. Moreover, it is also apparent that adoption of this system has at times been slow, and essentially driven by trading partners (e.g. major retailers). However, there are barriers to implementation and difficult organizational issues that need to be addressed in order to ensure these potential benefits are realized. These barriers have been perceived to be strong in the past, particularly with the use of established technologies. The authors also highlight the fact that the point of convergence for all case companies is in their preparedness to adopt and apply new technologies such as the Internet, and their commonly held view that these technologies will become increasingly important enablers of B2B EC in the near future.

The guest editor has been overwhelmed by the response to the call for papers on "Electronic commerce: a best practice perspective". All papers have been reviewed by at least two experts. The guest editor is very grateful for the assistance of the editor of this journal Professor A. Gunasekaran, Dr John McHale of Emerald and the anonymous referees who review the manuscripts.

Majed A. Al-Mashari