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Key Indicators for Successful Inter<strong>net</strong> Commerce 145<br />
Data Collection<br />
South African Background<br />
A brief background to the South African situation is presented, as the<br />
theoretical conjecture described through content analysis will be tested during<br />
phase two of this study, with e-commerce organizations based in this country.<br />
South Africa is a medium-sized country, an area of 471,000 square miles at<br />
the southern tip of the African continent, with a population of some 44 million<br />
people. It is relatively industrialized in comparison with the rest of Africa. South<br />
Africa is a wealthy country from an industrial and agricultural point of view and<br />
computers have been actively in use in South African business and industry since<br />
the early 1960s when both IBM and ICL opened offices in Johannesburg. Today,<br />
South Africa employs computers in every aspect of industry, business and<br />
government as well as having a relatively high percentage of home computers among<br />
the middle and upper class. All the major vendors are present and there is<br />
considerable interest in the use of Inter<strong>net</strong> technologies to support business.<br />
The Development of the Theory<br />
After summarizing the theory, it became necessary to analyze the data that had<br />
been collected in order to see what general principles relate to the assessment of<br />
success factors. The main process that was used was content analysis. Content<br />
analysis may be defined as the process of determining the fuller, detailed meaning<br />
of a document, manuscript, speech or any type of communication in a way that is<br />
both reliable and replicable. A formal definition of content analysis is supplied by<br />
Berelson (1952) as a research technique for the objective, systematic and<br />
quantitative description of the manifest content of communications. To perform<br />
content analysis, one must investigate the frequency and intensity of which concepts<br />
are addressed in the text. It is a simple but laborious process, since one must closely<br />
examine the documentation for concepts, particularly those that are repeated often.<br />
Berelson (1952) noted that content analysis might be used with different units of<br />
analysis including words, themes, characters, items and space-time measurements.<br />
The results of the content analysis were summarized into a main set of factors<br />
that could be regarded as success factors for e-commerce. Frequency tables<br />
showing the number of occasions in the discussion of the main themes that occurred<br />
during the analysis of the articles were drawn up. In this study, only themes that were<br />
raised by informants more than three times were included in the frequency table.<br />
In Figure 3, a list of the themes raised by the theory and their frequency are<br />
shown. The frequency table is based on the analysis as described in the previous<br />
section. The nature of the drivers is different as some of the drivers originate from<br />
the upper echelons of management (e.g., alignment of the goals) while some<br />
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