Overview

Network-based technologies (Internet and Electronic Data Interchange) are providing organizations with unsurpassed capabilities to conduct their business differently. Owing to their worldwide connectivity and interactivity, network-based technologies could be employed by organizations to re-engineer business processes, to market, distribute, and support products on a worldwide basis, to tap vast information stores as critical business resources, to form strategic alliances, and to reduce operating costs. These changes have profound implications for market efficiency and organizational performance. Hence, understanding how these changes evolve in organizations and the marketplace would be interesting research questions and could lead to competitive advantage at both the organization and national levels.

Area of Focus

1. Examine the effects of learning barriers on organizational exploitation of electronic commerce tools and opportunities. Assess the culture, knowledge, and mechanisms that must be put in place for organizations to be ready for a knowledge economy.

2. Examine the roles of geography and community in affecting Internet-based marketing and business-to-business electronic commerce. Identify how organizations can create "sticky" websites to sustain or enlarge an electronic community.

3. Examine the roles of comparison-shopping and negotiation agents on market efficiency as well as buyers and sellers through economic analysis, simulations, and laboratory experiments.
   
   
4. Assess the impact of electronic commerce on change management and organizational structure. This assessment includes virtual entities or organizations that are created as a result of exploiting electronic commerce.
   
   
5. Assess the value of environmental scanning on the Internet and its impact on organizational functions pertaining to marketing, sales, procurement, and general decision-making (e.g., forecasting).

Sample Publications

1. Lam, C.K.M and Tan, B.C.Y. "The Internet is Changing the Music Industry," Communications of the ACM, 2001, Volume 44, Number 8, pp. 62-68.

2. Goh, K.Y., Teo, H.H. and Wei, K.K., "Electronic Markets and Intelligent Agents: An Experimental Study of the Economics of Electronic Commerce," Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Information Systems, 1998, pp. 293-295.

3. Sia, C.L., Teo, H.H., Tan, B.C.Y. and Wei, K.K., "Examining Environmental Influences on Organizational Perceptions and Predispositions toward Distributed Work Arrangements: A Path Model," Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Information Systems, 1998, pp. 88-102.
   
   
4. Tan, S.S.L., Teo, H.H., Tan, B.C.Y. and Wei, K.K., "Environmental Scanning on the Internet," Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Information Systems, 1998, pp. 76-87.
   
   
   
5. Teo, H.H., Tan, B.C.Y. and Wei, K.K. "Organizational Transformation using Information Technology: The Case of TradeNet in Singapore," Journal of Management Information Systems, 1997, Volume 13, Number 4, pp. 139-165.