Chapter 12: Class Notes

SMART Objectives: (final exam question) for designing e-commerce website (transaction oriented)

1. to sell products and services (into existing market or creating a new market)
2. providing information / education to consumers
3. reach widespread target market
4. reduce costs - no brick and mortar, transactional costs (make the customers do the work), reduce intermediary costs (supply chain / just-in-time inventory), reducing aftersales support
5. recruiting employees
6. source new vendor relationships
7. selling advertising
8. sell memberships &/or subscriptions
9. provide info to shareholders/stakeholders
10. build brand identity/image
11. create an outlet/ clearance area/ auction
12. providing portals and web communities (stickiness)

How we measure whether we've met the objectives:

• specific, measureable, accurate/attainable, relavent to ore competency, timely (has some sort of milestone or date attached)

Ways to measure / indicators:

1. units & revenue ($)
2. using website statistics: hits (tells you every time you load a page - least info) / page views (if consumer comes to website, how many web pages did they view in your site ) / time spent on a page
3. IP address (tells you the location of the computer of the viewer)
4. saving and reducing costs: saving on investment, cost per transaction (#) (staffing of call centre, programmers time in developing the shopping cart), cost comparisons, wait time / customer satisfaction surveys
5. number of qualified applications, # of inquiries
6. # of qualified vendors / inquiries
7. revenue / website statistics (traffic) so we can charge cost per thousand / click
8. unit (# of subscriptions) / revenue
9. # of inquiries about stock from shareholders / count downloads of information from site
10. customer survey / inquiries
11. # of auction items / $ value of items going out , registrants , active participants in auction
12. # of registered users / # of posts

Managing Costs:

- Investing in a web business
- Small business ($10K to $50K)
- Entry-Level ($100K to $1M0
- Mid-Level ($2M to $5M)
- Large Site ($15M and up)
- maintenance costs between 50% and 200%

- Total cost of ownership - you are using or accounting for everything
- hardware & software
- programming & design: getting web designer (who know html and css) but also knows how to program the site to be interactive
- Maintenance & Support: having someone monitoring it / updating / security
- Training and documentation: who is updating, what do they need to know

- opportunity costs
- how much revenue is lost by not having website

- return on investment (ROI)
- requires quantification fo costs & benefits
- predicts benefits and returns (not hard numbers)
- emphasizes short-run versus long0run benefits

System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) - how do we get it done, manager with business-knowhow (business analyst) takes project through these stages - linear process
1. Plan
- critical success factors (CSFs)
- Project scope (SoW statement of work boundary)
- project plan (schedule/resources) -dictating whos doing what
2. Analysis
- business (user) requirements - paypal, etc
- functional specification document - output of this stage
3. Design
- hardware/software architecture - needed to do it
- technical specification document - output of this stage
4. Develop
- in-source (inhouse with own IT ppl); out-source (give it to another company); self-source (diff departments create different parts within their system)
- early sourcing; late sourcing (when do we actual get help?); partial-sourcing
5. Test
- componentl interface; system testing - is it working?
- user acceptance and usability testing - does it meet the functional specifications, does it work like my users need it to work?, if cusomters go to site, is it easy for them to put in credit card number.....etc etc
6. Implement
- selecting a hosting service (functionality; reliability; security, backup and disaster recovery, bandwidth and server scalability, operating and maintenance costs)
- training and cosumentation
- policies and procedures
7. Maintain
- establish help desk and FAQs
- user and technical support procedures

Project Management: being aware of system life cycle and assigning jobs to people
Software Tools
1. Identifying Dependencies - i cant start my phase until you finish yours
2. Create the Schedule:
3. Manage the Resources: making sure ppl do what they need to do
4. Evaluate the risks: what is the risk is somebody falls out of completing task on time