Electronic Commerce
Over the past decade, the emergence of electronic commerce
has highlighted quality information as an increasingly critical component for
organizational success. Quality information is necessary for purely digital
products and also for information-augmented products where information about a
product supplements the physical product or a service itself. In all these
cases the product experience is degraded when information quality is deficient.
Speed and reach characterize electronic commerce
environments. Each affects information quality by affecting attributes such as
information timeliness, completeness, and context. Beyond their impact on
information attributes, speed and reach also change the inter-organizational
dynamic regarding innovation. Prior to the internet, another firm could copy
one company's revolutionary product or product enhancement only after
experiencing time lags caused by temporal barriers involving information
access, product development, and customer response. In electronic commerce
environments the dynamic of product copying has indeed changed. Web site
enhancements and new business practices are immediately available and easily
duplicated. Developers now may upgrade internally or draw from others, and the
time necessary is no longer measured in months or years, but often in weeks,
days, or even hours. This altered landscape has affected information quality
and its relationship to business success.
Information Quality
Numerous studies have identified the various attributes of
information quality (in the literature, sometimes referred to as “data
quality”). The plethora of dimensions
mentioned in these studies – each logical but when aggregated, overwhelming –
begs summarization. A common thread
throughout these papers is using four dimensions to capture many possible
information quality (IQ) attributes:
Intrinsic IQ
measures accuracy, believability, objectivity, precision, and reliability and
indicates quality inherent in the information itself.
Contextual IQ
measures relevance, timeliness, completeness, and appropriateness and relates
to considering information in the context of the task at hand.
Representational IQ
includes understandability, interpretability, concise and consistent
representation, format, and appearance and addresses how systems store, process
and present information.
Accessibility IQ
measures accessibility, security, system availability, ease of operation, and
privileges and deals with system aspects of how easy one can “get at”
information and how secure is that information.
Information Systems
Adoption Models
Many models and analysis frameworks have been developed to
help organisations construct strategies or provide a starting point for a
working agenda of progressive implementation in their company. Most of the
models use a categorisation system for the positioning of an individual company
at a predefined level. This process
analysis extracted from quantitative results has paved the way for a
qualitative inter-organisational examination to expand and dissect issues faced
by an organisation implementing a new technique.
Successful implementation of strategic information systems
is based on a process of strategy formulation, which is embedded into the
business strategy that includes a socio-technical element. The various models analyze organisational
values such as strategy, structure, systems, culture; to form the resulting
socio-technical fit. There have been
many models created identifying and analysing the implementation, integration
and impact of adoption of new information communication techniques into an
organisation. It is becoming more apparent that for a comprehensive and
successful inclusion of new communication technology the recognition and
analysis of socio-technical fit and culture should be included in parallel with
process development in formulating an adoption strategy.
It has been identified by many authors that getting people
and technology working in harmony is the key to high productivity. Organisation and human factors have to be
dealt with concurrently to smooth the transition to a new system. There are other authors who have extended the
understanding of socio-technical fit by constructing a table of categorised
implementation problems that beset BPR projects following an exhaustive factor
analytic procedure – “Categories of reengineering implementation problems”. It is indicated that changing values and
beliefs is one of the most important aspects in any serious attempt to
transform business performance. In
addition to this cultural change is one of the most intractable aspects of
successful business process management.
Creating an accurate picture of the current business
situation and of future business requirements is essential for stage monitoring
or predefined progressive change and development. Both technical and social
elements could result in the improvement of the clarity of that picture.
SOURCE:
Jackson, Martin L. and Sloane, Andy (2007) “A model for
analysing the success of adopting new technologies focusing on electronic
commerce”, Business Process Management Journal, Vol. 13 Iss: 1, pp.121 – 138
Miller, Holmes (2005) “Information quality and market share
in electronic commerce”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 19 Iss: 2, pp.93 –
102
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