course material

1. E-BUSINESS, E-COMMERCE, AND M-COMMERCE
Description The Case Assignment for this module involves your understanding the e-
business sector as a component of the information technology revolution currently under
way. As usual, we’ve identified some salient sources that will be of help to you in forming
this understanding. The question at hand is basically where all this is going, and what the
effects are likely to be. Forecasting the future is always a risky proposition; if it weren’t,
there would be a whole lot more Mark Zuckerbergs out there riding their visions to
billionaire-hood. Of course, figuring out that things are likely to change and figuring out
exactly how to monetize some small piece of that change process for your own benefit are
rather different things. Let’s start with the simpler aspect; based on where you see the
world of e-commerce today as part of the overall information technology management
domain, where’s the potential for future development? Certainly it would be silly to
presume that within the last 5 to 10 years we’ve managed to figure out everything possible
to do in the economic domain with electronic interaction. So we know there will be change;
the question is what, where, and with what effects. The format for your assignment for this
module is a little different from that for the first two modules. There, you were essentially
instructing point/counterpoint arguments relative to a particular proposition. This
assignment calls for a more open-ended approach. Essentially, you’re doing some
forecasting about the future of the electronic economy. If you do this well enough, maybe
you will be the next Mark Zuckerberg—or maybe not. At any rate, give it a shot. Obviously,
there are no clear right or wrong answers to this question; we don’t have a list in mind of
things that we expect you to come up with, except in the most general sense. It’s your job to
make a case for your forecast. It’s not enough just to say “I think that X will happen”; you
have to say rather precisely what X is, what it will do for people, why people might be
persuaded to use it, and what sort of individual and societal effects it might be expected to
have. This involves going to your sources, finding supporting evidence, and developing each
of your ideas logically. Futurology is not just blue-sky theorizing or speculative science
fiction; while time travel and matter transmutation might be expected to have major
economic effects, I doubt you could develop a reasonable argument saying that they’re
likely to happen within the next decade. And a lot of people have gone broke trying to
forecast the future of information technology. On the other hand, there have always been
long-term trends that have enabled a lot of people to develop ideas that worked; for
example, Moore’s Law seems to be still operating. So as you do your reading, try to think
about these trends, project from where we are now to what seems reasonable, even if it’s a

2. bit adventurous, and make the best arguments you can. We’ll be evaluating your arguments,
not necessarily waiting around to find out if your vision comes true. As we noted before, if
you don’t really pay attention to this material, it’s really unlikely that you can write an
acceptable paper on the topic below, let alone an exceptional one. We spend quite a lot of
time trying to identify useful sources for you that bear on our topics for analysis; while we
strongly encourage you to conduct your own further research and identify additional useful
sources, this should be an add-on to the basic material rather than a substitute for it.
Winter, S. (2012). The rise of cyberinfrastructure and grand challenge for eCommerce.
Information Systems and eBusiness Management, 10(3), 279-293. Barrett, T. (2014). The
Internet of things. Ted Talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTIt1C5R-M. Blum, A.
(2012). Discover the physical side of the Internet.
http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_blum_what_is_the_internet_really Shoper, T. (2012).
Shopping in 2020: What will the future of ecommerce look likd.
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/shopping-2020-future-ecommerce/#EBUSINESS
#ECOMMERCE #MCOMMERCE