Challenges in Managing Technolgoy

THE CHALLENGES

IN

MANAGING Technology

CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................................................2

Section I The Challenges in Technology ...................................2

Types of e-commerce...................................................3

Designing the Web Page...............................................4

Keep it Simple...........................................................5

Choose your Product...................................................6

Improve Security and Trust............................................6

Creating Customer Confidence.......................................7

How the Competition is doing........................................8

Section II E-Commerce and Organizational Management..............................9

Section III E-Commerce and Management of Information Technology..............11

Conclusion.........................................................................................11

Bibliography.......................................................................................12

Introduction

The evolution of technology has changed our lives. More importantly has changed the way we do business. Business strategies have been redefined to take advantage of the new and advanced technology. The discovery of the Internet has shifted the industry toward new and efficient ways to reach the consumers. The Internet has brought vision closer to reality and the future to the present. With the new communication tools such as email, availability of web browsers and the decrease in the price of PC's. E-Commerce has become an attractive way of doing business. Retail stores have discovered a way to provide goods and services 24/7. Better yet they still keep their cost down. In the first section of this paper I will present a detail description of some of the important challenges that managers are faced with when managing e-commerce. In the second section of this paper I will look at managing e-commerce from the organizational management prospective. And finally section three will describe how e-commerce is important to the management of information technology.

Section I: The Challenges in Managing e-Commerce

E-Commerce, or Electronic Commerce, is a general term for any type of business or commercial transaction that involves the transfer of information across the Internet. This covers a range of different types of businesses such as amazon.com, eBay, priceline, etc. Electronic Commerce has expanded rapidly over the past six years and this growth as described in the following paragraph, is forecast to continue or even accelerate. It is likely that in the future the boundaries between conventional and electronic commerce will increasingly fade away as more and more businesses move parts of their operation onto the Internet.

The 1999 Christmas holiday season is known to be a major event in the e-commerce revolution. Online shopping approached 1 percent of holiday retail sales within the US for the first time. It has been projected that the number of US households accessing the Internet will increase from 28 millions to 43 million individuals by the year 2003. And the number of individuals accessing the Internet worldwide will increase from 81 million to 140 million during the same time period. And In the new millennium male users are no longer significantly predominated and people of age 40 and older had major presence. E-commerce applications are not limited to sales and support activities, but also include web sites for information. For example in year 2000-holiday period 45 percent used the Internet for gift ideas, 32 percent used the web to compare prices, while only 24 percent actually bought gifts online (Martin, Brown, DeHayes, Hoffer and Perkins 2002).

Types of e-commerce

One can distinguish the two types of commerce, where traditional or physical commerce is a transaction that takes place via contact between humans in a physical outlet such as a store. On the other hand the e-commerce is a digital transaction usually takes place over the Internet. According to the relationship between buyers and sellers, e-commerce can be categorized into four types as described below.

1- Business-to-consumer (B2C). This defines the relation between a business organization who is being the seller and the consumer who is the buyer. In this case the business drives the specifications of the products and the consumer chooses whether to buy or not.

2- Business-to-business (B2B). In this case both the buyers and the sellers are business organizations. In other words it is a supply chain management for example a virtual book store needs to order books from various publishers.

3- Consumer-to-consumer (C2C). This refers to the situation where both the sellers and the buyers are consumers. Online auctions provide an effective mean for supporting C2C e-commerce such as eBay.

4- Consumer to business (C2B). In this case the consumer specifies the requirements to the business, which provides a product that meets these requirements. In other words this is a consumer driven environment such as Priceline (Chan, Lee, Dillon and Chang 2001).

Managing e-commerce is no less than managing any other information technology functions. As a matter of fact it is more challenging to manage e-commerce, I believe there are more elements involved in being successful in managing e-commerce. Managers are faced with many challenging issues in managing e-commerce, in the next few paragraphs I will explore some of these issues, which I think are critical to the success in the e-commerce world

Designing the Web Page

A Home Page is the usual way in which a business or a person lets the world know they are there. Most Home Pages are written in a computer language known as HTML, or