1. A brief profile of your chosen organisation.
a. Include the full name of the organisation, its main trade, how long it has been in business, where it is located, any other locations, employees, turnover, products, distribution and main competitors.
2. A review of the current implementation of the Internet in the organisation.
a. Type of web site(s)
b. Use of the web
c. How long the organisation has used the web for business
d. How great an impact you consider the Internet to be for this company
3. How is the Internet advantaging this organisation?
a. Rank according to the six areas of importance: cost reduction, new capability, communication, customer service, control, competitive advantage.
4. For the industry related to this organisation, is the organisation ahead of the times, in keeping with it, or behind?
5. Distinguish between the e-Business and e-Commerce activities of this organisation.
6. Discuss this organisation from the perspective of McKinsey's 7 S's of Organisational Change
7. How has the use or potential use of e-commerce in your organisation impacted business relationships in a general sense?
8. What business model is in use within your organisation?
9. What online marketplace analysis is in use within your?
10. Which revenue models are in use within your organisation?
11. Communications (fast enough?)
12. Availability (Site up when you check it)
13. Bugs on site through pages being unavailable or information typed in forms not being executed?
14. Can you tell who is hosting the site, if its not the organisation itself?
15. Does the site appear to have an intranet? How can you tell?
16. Does the site have an extranet? How is it accessed?
17. Is there a database associated with the site? If so, what is its use and functionality?
18. Are usage statistics available for the site?
19. Use this site: https://www.ipaddresslocation.org/ to find the IP address for your organisation's web site
20. Now use https://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp or https://whois.ausregistry.net/ to find the ownership information for your organisation
21. Can you look at the code of the site and see the meta tags? If so, list a few of them.
22. Is the information on the site up to date? How can you tell or not tell?
23. What language(s) is the written in? HTML, XML, others
24. Give your opinion of this site overall using your vast knowledge of e-Commerce from the past units you have taken.
This week your case study development will be expanded to include some of the environmental aspects impacting your organisation.
25. Using the lists presented in lecture this week, name and discuss your top three drivers, barriers, and benefits to your organisation using the Internet for business. Be sure to explain why you chose the three over the other options.
26. Using the information shown below, discuss your organisation in the context of these aspects of e-Commerce Micro Environments.
Micro Environment
- Customers - which services are they offering via their web site that your organization could support them in?
- Competitors - need to be benchmarked in order to review the online services they are offering - do they have a competitive advantage?
- Intermediaries - are new or existing intermediaries offering products or services from your competitors while you are not represented?
- Suppliers - are suppliers offering different methods of procurement to competitors that give them a competitive advantage?
27. Using the information shown below, discuss your organisation in the context of these aspects of e-Commerce Macro Environments.
Macro-environment
- Society - what is the ethical and moral consensus on holding personal information?
- Country specific, international legal - what are the local and global legal constraints for example on holding personal information, or taxation rules on sale of goods?
- Country specific, international economic - what are the economic constraints of operating within a country or global constraints?
- Technology - what new technologies are emerging by which to deliver online services such as interactive digital TV and mobile phone-based access?
E-business Strategy
This week your case study development will consider some of the e-business strategies of your organisation.
1. Referring to the steps of e-Business adoption found in the slides for lecture week 5, indicate where your organisation falls within these steps.
2. Discuss at least three of the competitive threats affecting your organisation (threat of new e-commerce entrants, of new digital products, and of new business models).
3. Take the rest of the tutorial to work on your assignment due this week.
Electronic Supply Chain Management
This week your case study development will consider some of the electronic supply chain methods used by your organisation. You will need to refer to the lecture on e-supply chain management during this exercise.
1. Identify within your company the elements of the value chain:
"Value chain: materials, information, payments, and services from raw material suppliers, through factories and warehouses"
a. Describe what these would be for your organisation and how they might flow in the type of organisation that you are using. For example, are intermediaries used in your type of organisation? Use the diagrams found in the lecture slides to identify parts of the value chain that pertain to your organisation. Describe and draw your own diagrams to illustrate. Be specific.
2. Discuss the three supply chain flows within your organisation: material, information and financial. Point out which of these you believe are electronic now, and forecast which may be made electronic to further enhance your organisation's effectiveness. Also be sure to identify which parts are upstream, internal and downstream.
3. Consider the following e-commerce aspects of electronic supply chains: identify suppliers, make payments, and check availability of supplies, automatic reordering of supplies through shared systems, track order progress, collaborative demand planning and forecasting. How many of these do you believe are currently in use within your organisation? You may not be able to get this information, so you may have to go on instinct here. If your organisation is not using these things, do you think they should be?
4. Using the lecture slides as a guide, discuss some of the problems that your organisation specifically might encounter using electronic supply chain management.
Electronic Procurement
In this week your case study development will consider some of the electronic procurement methods used by your organisation. You will need to refer to the lecture on e-procurement during this exercise.
1. Examine the slide in the e-Procurement lecture that details the common procurement activities in an organisation.
a. How many of these activities apply to your organisation? Be detailed and specific in your answer
b. Assume that your organisation is not already using e-procurement options.
i. Identify how many of the activities could be implemented within your organisation and how.
Use diagrams to illustrate your points.
E-Marketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
This week your case study development will consider some of the e-Marketing methods used by your organisation. You will need to refer to the lecture on e-Marketing during this exercise.
1. Using a mix of the e-Marketing tools highlighted in the lecture, create an outline e-marketing plan intended to implement the e-marketing strategy. Consider the following items when creating your plan:
a. How can the organisation integrate traditional marketing approaches with e-marketing?
b. How can the organisation use electronic communications to differentiate products and services?
c. How does the organisation redefine marketing and communications mixes to incorporate new media?
2. How would you go about assessing the effectiveness of a new e-Marketing campaign for your organisation? Be detailed and comprehensive in your discussion.
3. Which of four classic marketing activities of CRM has or have been used in your organisation. How? Please detail them.
Which three techniques of CRM have been used in your organisation? How? Please detail them.
Change Management in Electronic Commerce
This week your case study development will consider some of the change management issues that may be faced by your organisation. You will need to refer to the lecture on change management during this exercise.
1. Consider all of the case studies completed to date for your organisation. Detail in about 600 words the methods that you would employ to manage the change in your organisation if it were to undergo a full-scale electronic commerce initiative. Take into consideration what you know about your organisation's level of electronic commerce immersion when planning your management of change internally. If you are working with an organisation with a high level of existing electronic commerce/business, you will need one method of management, as opposed to another method if your organisation has not previously had a great deal of electronic commerce/business immersion.
2. When you complete number 1 above, you may work on your team assignment for the rest of the tutorial.
Analysis and Design in Electronic Commerce
This week your task is to analyse the future need of your company case study. Consider all of the areas that you focused on throughout the semester and write a 2 page, single-spaced report covering the areas that you feel will need to be upgraded to fully take advantage of e-commerce. In addition, include the following in your report:
1. Use use-case analysis to determine the actors, use cases and relate actors to use-cases of your company's e-commerce systems.
2. Review the site design issues from the lecture slides and report on whether the existing company web site follows these suggestions.
3. Identify the main security risks that exist for a company such as yours on the web.