Assessment of the Impacts of E-Commerce Technologies on Overall Business Processes: An Analytic Delphi ProcessStacey Erica Ewton
This research assesses emerging e-commerce technologies and the impact of these technologies on organizational business processes. The methodology utilized is an analytic Delphi study where business experts assessed both the adoption of e-commerce technologies and the impacts of these technologies on businesses and business processes. Delphi offered a mechanism to make these assessments via a panel of experts and was the chosen methodology because the Internet is a relatively new, disruptive technology, and thus, sufficient historical data were not available to effectively utilize trend analysis or other traditional forecasting methodologies. Once the initial trends in e-commerce were identified via traditional Delphi, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was used to quantify experts’ judgments to determine the relative contribution of each technology to the business change agents and the contribution of each business change agent to impacting overall business processes. The research methodology required a team of twelve e-commerce experts to respond to three sets of research instruments. The experts for this study were chosen based on their: 1) knowledge of emerging technologies, 2) existing usage of e-commerce, 3) development of e-commerce technologies, and 4) understanding of existing business processes across functional groups. The results of the research were that experts identified seven major e-commerce technologies that are currently in use and will continue to be in use in their forecasting time horizon of two years: 1) Email, 2) ECRM Tools, 3) E-Teleconferencing, 4) B2C Tools, 5) B2B Tools, 6) M-Commerce, and 7) Streaming Video. Experts also identified eight major business change agents based on the adoption of these e-commerce technologies: 1) Improved Communication, 2) Improved Product Development, 3) Increased Overall Efficiency, 4) Decreased Face-to-Face Interaction, 5) Increased 24x7 Work, 6) Decreased Overall Costs, 7) Decreased Inventory, and 8) Increased Telecommuting. The experts identified electronic mail (email) as the most significant technology to impact business change agents and overall business processes; electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) followed email. According to the panel, the major area, through which these technologies impacted overall business processes, was improved communication, followed by product development and increased overall efficiency.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
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