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The Emerging Need for E-Commerce Accepted Practice (ECAP) 51 INTRODUCTION “The newest innovations, which we label information technologies, have begun to alter the manner in which we do business and create value, often in ways not readily foreseeable even five years ago. ” Alan Greenspan Chair, Federal Reserve Board May 6, 1999 A large multinational corporation once attempted to sell baby food in an African nation by using packaging designed for its home country market. The company’s regular label showed a picture of a baby with a caption describing the kind of baby food contained in the jar. African consumers took one look at the product and were horrified. They interpreted the label to mean that the jar contained ground-up babies (Ricks, 1993)! This example serves to illustrate that the design of effective e-commerce sites requires careful planning and sensitivity to cultural issues. For example, South Africa is a low to middle-income, developing country with an abundant supply of resources, well-developed financial, legal, communications, energy and transport sectors, a stock exchange that ranks among the ten largest in the world, and a modern infrastructure supporting an efficient distribution of goods to major centers throughout the region. However, growth has not been strong enough to reduce the prevailing 30 percent unemployment figure. Daunting economic problems remain from the apartheid era, especially poverty and lack of educational and economic empowerment among disadvantaged groups. At the end of 2000, President Mbeki vowed to promote economic growth and foreign investment, and to reduce poverty by relaxing restrictive labour laws, stepping up the pace of privatisation, and cutting unneeded governmental spending. Eleven official languages and cultural diversity further complicate all these challenges. E-commerce cannot target specific audiences, so South Africa illustrates how difficult it is to appeal to customers. The evolution of Web-based business activity has resulted in the term e- Business referring to three categories of business activity: • Business-to-Employee (B2E): Intranet-based applications internal to a company. • Business-to-Consumer (B2C): Internet-based applications for a company’s customers and • Business-to-Business (B2B): Extranet-based applications for a company’s business partners. (An IOS: Inter Organisational System). Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
52 Erwin and Singh [The term e-Commerce often refers only to B2B (McNurlin & Sprague, 2002)] BACKGROUND The use of information technology (IT) - computers and telecommunications - has been growing at an increasing rate ever since the invention of the modern computer in the 1950s. Now, with the widespread development of the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW, ‘the Web’), change has accelerated even more (McNurlin & Sprague, 2002). Computer-based information systems (CBIS) are information systems that require hardware, software, databases, telecommunications, procedures and people to accomplish their goals (Stair, 1992). As a preliminary investigation into good Web practice, the authors conducted research on technological features that affect Web-based services (Erwin & Singh, 2001). Some comments by respondents to a survey on Web-based service features were: • ‘I consider it important that in addition to Web sites with all the “bells and whistles”, a “text-only” version should be made available for fast load times and for learners who do not have fast links and the latest browsers.’ • ‘Tools need to support doing the basic functions quickly and easily rather than doing lots of fancy stuff.’ • ‘I (and most colleagues) hate frames, therefore tend to avoid them.’ • ‘Often “help” isn’t helpful!’ These quotations indicate resistance to new technologies (methods) and propensity to use a relatively small subset of available features. Tools supporting e-commerce often have older technologies such as telephones, faxes and help desks. However, there is an emerging mix of technologies specific to the Web (Erwin & Singh, 2001). These technologies now introduce a new set of complexities for an auditor of this electronic environment. TECHNOLOGICAL TRENDS IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Technological changes are having enormous impact on the capabilities of organizational systems (Turban, et al., 2001). Table 1 outlines some general information technology trends affecting organizational systems. Copyright © 2003, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
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About the Authors 259 Eric Cloete B
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