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