December 2003 - Vol. 46 No. 12

A longitudinal study at four companies provides valuable insights about the evolution of IT outsourcing relationships.

In online marketplaces like the Internet, both buyers and sellers face high levels of uncertainty. Concerns about security, trust, authentication, fraud, and risk of loss are often cited as among the most significant barriers to the growth of e-commerce [4]. A particularly important factor feeding the uncertainty is that traditional authentication mechanisms based on physical […]

Despite the dot-com bust, e-business continues to expand, as many large, traditional businesses embrace it as a key component of their competitive strategies [8]. Forrester Research has estimated that e-business is expected to grow to $6.8 trillion worldwide by the year 2004, with its impact felt in almost every segment of the global economy [6]. […]

With the advent of the Internet, retail business attracted a myriad of new online pure players employing a clicks-only business model. In the early stage of electronic commerce, many of these “e-tailers” achieved stunning growth rates and had massive revenue streams. Online retailers such as Amazon.com and CDNOW.com, led the way as startups that showed […]

With the luxury of 20–20 hindsight, it has become increasingly clear that the Midas touch exhibited by virtual entities was reflective of an irrational exuberance. It was only a few years ago that the dot coms were extolled while the brick and mortars saddled with “burdensome” physical assets, and were ridiculed for being late in […]

The phenomenal growth in the IT sector over the past two decades has slowed down as organizations cut back their spending plans in response to the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the weak global economy. The long boom may be over, and there are doubts about the nature of the boom itself. The perceived […]

The extension of money and banking to the cyberspace is an inevitable development in the information age. Over the past few years, many financial institutions have launched e-retail banking over the Internet. Given the requirements of matching marginal gains against marginal costs, evaluating the profitability of market development along specific dimensions and segments, and determining […]

While e-commerce has not changed the basic nature of the commercial transaction, a trust gap has developed in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce transactions. This trust gap centers primarily on the privacy of personally identifiable information, such as name, address, and so forth, that is an essential element of B2C transactions. A Forrester research survey suggests that […]

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has been the focus of media hype for the last five years. Like many other technologies in the e-commerce area, it has dropped from a media and Wall Street favorite in 1999 to one that is going through a market shakeout. In both the business-to-consumer (B2C) and B2B marketplaces, existing firms in […]

Online social networks are increasingly being recognized as an important source of information influencing the adoption and use of products and services. Viral marketing—the tactic of creating a process where interested people can market to each other—is therefore emerging as an important means to spread-the-word and stimulate the trial, adoption, and use of products and […]

Egghead, a brick-and-mortar computer retailer, with stores across 200 locations, abandoned its brick establishments to become a pure Internet set-up, Egghead.com.<br><br>Charles Schwab was quick to react to the strategies of E*Trade and other competitors and moved its brokerage services to the Web. It gradually expanded its Web services to many areas, integrated its offline and online operations and became a brick-and-click set-up.<br><br>Through effective use of the Internet, UPS has been able to offer all of its services on the Web, as well as extend them. Apart from offering Web-based package tracking and delivery confirmation services, UPS offers document exchange service through which its business clients can transmit documents over the Net.

The Internet is evolving not only to provide information and e-commerce transactions, but also to act as the platform through which services are delivered to businesses and customers. These electronic services or e-services could become a key part of the value provided by many businesses [2, 5, 10]. At the core of this evolution is […]

A major promise of the Internet is its potential for online shopping and its benefits in the form of cost reduction, for consumers and businesses alike. For example, according to Penton Research (www.penton.com), using the Web site as a marketing tool provides a compelling means for cost reduction in terms of cost per contact statistics […]

Even though U.S. businesses spend half of their business equipment budgets on IT, only one out of six software projects is successful. Annually, this adds up to about $75 billion a year in failed projects, $22 billion in cost overruns, and another $175 million for systems that deliver less than they claim [9]. The elusivity […]

Why is it that e-businesses have not performed in line with expectations in the past years? Despite very optimistic projections for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce not long ago, businesses have been very cautious in embracing this technology. One of the critical factors playing a major role is the risk associated with online commerce. Thus, a framework […]