E-business infrastructure Bandwidth Retailers download the latest price lists and promotional infor-

164 A major factor for a company to consider when choosing an ISP is whether the server is dedi- cated to one company or whether content from several companies is located on the same server. A dedicated server is best, but it will attract a premium price. Availability The availability of a web site is an indication of how easy it is for a user to connect to it. In theory this figure should be 100 per cent, but sometimes, for technical reasons such as fail- ures in the server hardware or upgrades to software, the figure can drop substantially below this. Box 3.8 illustrates some of the potential problems and how companies can evaluate and address them. Box 3.8 Preventing wobbly shopping carts Table 3.5 Web site Average download speed Page size 1 Thomas Cook 4.65 s 18.46 kb 2 British Airways 5.15 s 23.46 kb 3 Next On-Line Shopping 5.64 s 26.90 kb 4 easyJet 6.09 s 27.88 kb 5 NTL 6.66 s 29.77 kb 95 Nokia UK 37.60 s 180.98 kb 96 The Salvation Army 37.68 s 171.07 kb 97 Rail Track 38.14 s 111.00 kb 98 workthing.com 38.77 s 187.35 kb 99 Orange 40.01 s 194.16 kb 100 FT.com 44.39 s 211.55 kb Source: Site Confidence www.siteconfidence.co.uk Variation in download speed for a 56.6 kbps modem and page size for the top five and bottom five UK sites week starting 6 October 2005 Part 1 Introduction The extent of the problem of e-commerce service levels was indicated by The Register 2004 in an article titled ‘Wobbly shopping carts blight UK e-commerce’. The research showed that failure of transactions once customers have decided to buy is often a problem. As the article said, ‘UK E-commerce sites are slapping customers in the face, rather than shaking them by the hand. Turning consumers away once they have made a decision to buy is commercial suicide.’ The research showed this level of problems: ix 20 of shopping carts did not function for 12 hours a month or more. x 75 failed the standard service level availability of 99.9 uptime. xi 80 performed inconsistently with widely varying response times, time-outs and errors – leaving customers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to complete their purchases. Similarly, SciVisum, a web testing specialist found that three-quarters of Internet marketing campaigns are impacted by web site failures, with 14 per cent of failures so severe that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company Service-level agreements To ensure the best speed and availability a company should check the service-level agreements SLAs carefully when outsourcing web site hosting services. The SLA will define confirmed standards of availability and performance measured in terms of the latency or network delay when information is passed from one point to the next such as London to New York. The SLA also includes notification to the customer detailing when the web service becomes unavailable with reasons why and estimates of when the service will be restored. Further information on SLAs is available at www.uk.uu.netsupportsla . Security Security is another important issue in service quality. How to control security was referred to in the earlier section on firewalls and is considered in detail in the Focus on security design Chapter 11, p. 652. Managing employee access to the Internet and e-mail This is covered in Chapter 11 in the Focus on e-business security section. Managing e-business applications infrastructure Management of the e-business applications infrastructure concerns delivering the right applications to all users of e-business services. The issue involved is one that has long been a concern of IS managers, namely to deliver access to integrated applications and data that are available across the whole company. Traditionally businesses have developed applications silos or islands of information, as depicted in Figure 3.17a. This shows that these silos may 165 surveyed marketing professionals from 100 UK-based organizations across the retail, financial, travel and online gaming sectors. More than a third of failures were rated as ‘serious to severe’, with many customers complaining or unable to complete web transactions. These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are owned by others in the business, but marketers need to ask the right questions. The SciVisum 2005 research showed that nearly two-thirds of marketing professionals did not know how many users making transactions their web sites could support, despite an average transaction value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into campaign plans. Thirty-seven per cent could not put a monetary value on losses caused by customers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organizations experi- enced web site overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication between the two departments. SciVisum recommends that companies do the following: 1 Define the peak visitor throughput requirements for each customer journey on the site. For example, the site should be able to support at the same time: approxi- mately ten checkout journeys per second, thirty add-to-basket journeys per second, five registration journeys per second, two check-my-order-status journeys per second. 2 Service-level agreement. More detailed technical requirements need to be agreed for each of the transactions stages. Home-page delivery time and server uptime are insufficiently detailed. 3 Set up a monitoring programme that measures and reports on the agreed journeys 247.

Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure

Service-level agreement A contractual specification of service standards a contractor must meet. E-business applications infrastructure Applications that provide access to services and information inside and beyond an organization. develop at three different levels: 1 there may be different technology architectures used in different functional areas, giving rise to the problems discussed in the previous section, 2 there will also be different applications and separate databases in different areas and 3 processes or activities followed in the different functional areas may also be different. These applications silos are often a result of decentralization or poorly controlled invest- ment in information systems, with different departmental managers selecting different systems from different vendors. This is inefficient in that it will often cost more to purchase applications from separate vendors, and also it will be more costly to support and upgrade. Even worse is that such a fragmented approach stifles decision making and leads to isolation between functional units. An operational example of the problems this may cause is if a cus- tomer phones a B2B company for the status of a bespoke item they have ordered, where the person in customer support may have access to their personal details but not the status of their job, which is stored on a separate information system in the manufacturing unit. Prob- lems can also occur at tactical and strategic levels. For example, if a company is trying to analyse the financial contribution of customers, perhaps to calculate lifetime values, some information about customers’ purchases may be stored in a marketing information system, while the payments data will be stored in a separate system within the finance department. It may prove difficult or impossible to reconcile these different data sets. To avoid the problems of a fragmented applications infrastructure, companies attempted throughout the 1990s to achieve the more integrated position shown in Figure 3.17b. Here the technology architecture, applications, data architecture and process architecture are uni- form and integrated across the organization. To achieve this many companies turned to enterprise resource planning ERP vendors such as SAP, Baan, PeopleSoft and Oracle. The approach of integrating different applications through ERP is entirely consistent with the principle of e-business, since e-business applications must facilitate the integration of the whole supply chain and value chain. It is noteworthy that many of the ERP vendors such as SAP have repositioned themselves as suppliers of e-business solutions The difficulty for those managing e-business infrastructure is that there is not, and probably never can be, a single solution of components from a single supplier. For example, to gain competitive edge, companies may need to turn to solutions from innovators who, for example, support new channels such as WAP, or provide knowledge management solutions or sales manage- ment solutions. If these are not available from their favoured current supplier, do they wait until these components become available or do they attempt to integrate new software into the application? Thus managers are faced with a precarious balancing act between standardization or core product and integrating innovative systems where applicable. Figure 3.18 illustrates this dilemma. It shows how different types of applications tend to have strengths in different areas. ERP systems were originally focused on achieving integration at the operational level of an organiza- tion. Solutions for other applications such as business intelligence in the form of data warehousing and data mining tended to focus on tactical decision making based on accessing the operational data from within ERP systems. Knowledge management software Chapter 10 also tends to cut across different levels of management. Figure 3.18 only shows some types of applications, but it shows the trial of strength between the monolithic ERP applications and more specialist applications looking to provide the same functionality. In this section we have introduced some of the issues of managing e-business infrastruc- ture. These are examined in more detail later in the book. Figure 3.19 summarizes some of these management issues and is based on the layered architecture introduced at the start of this section with applications infrastructure at the top and technology infrastructure towards the bottom. 166 Part 1 Introduction Enterprise resource planning ERP applications Software providing integrated functions for major business functions such as production, distribution, sales, finance and human resources management. Best of breed vs single-source systems Selecting ‘best-of-breed’ applications from multiple system vendors for different e-business applications such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, transactional e-commerce and supply chain management is a better approach for an effective e-business infrastructure than using a single- vendor solution. Debate 3.2