Key Factors for E-commerce Success and Decision Making
Key Factors for Building a Successful E-commerce Presence
Building a successful e-commerce site requires a clear understanding of the business objectives to be achieved by the site and selection of the right technology to achieve those objectives. E-commerce sites can be built and hosted in-house or partially or fully outsourced to external service providers.
Understanding Decision-Making Processes in Organizations
Different levels in an organization have different decision-making requirements. Decisions can be structured, semistructured, or unstructured, with structured decisions clustering at the operational level of the organization and unstructured decisions at the strategic level. Decision-making can be performed by individuals or groups and includes employees as well as operational, middle, and senior managers. There are four stages in decision making:
- Intelligence
- Design
- Choice
- Implementation
Systems to support decision-making do not always produce better manager and employee decisions that improve firm performance because of problems with information quality, management filters, and organizational culture.
How Information Systems Support Managerial Activities
Early classical models of managerial activities stress the functions of planning, organizing, coordinating, deciding, and controlling. Contemporary research looking at the actual behavior of managers has found that managers’ real activities are highly fragmented, variegated, and brief in duration and that managers shy away from making grand, sweeping policy decisions. Information technology provides new tools for managers to carry out both their traditional and newer roles, enabling them to monitor, plan, and forecast with more precision and speed than ever before and to respond more rapidly to the changing business environment. Information systems have been most helpful to managers by providing support for their roles in:
- Disseminating information
- Providing liaisons between organizational levels
- Allocating resources
However, information systems are less successful at supporting unstructured decisions. Where information systems are useful, information quality, management filters, and organizational culture can degrade decision-making.
Business Intelligence and Analytics for Decision Support
Business intelligence and analytics promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time information to decision-makers, and the analytic tools help them quickly understand the information and take action. A business intelligence environment consists of:
- Data from the business environment
- The BI infrastructure
- A BA toolset
- Managerial users and methods
- A BI delivery platform
- The user interface
There are six analytic functionalities that BI systems deliver to achieve these ends:
- Predefined production reports
- Parameterized reports
- Dashboards and scorecards
- Ad hoc queries and searches
- The ability to drill down to detailed views of data
- The ability to model scenarios and create forecasts