First Class

At our first class on Wednesday, October 7, the downtown KPMG Peat Marwick Partner who leads their e-commerce practice will speak on "Electronic Commerce: A Consultant’s Perspective."

So that he won’t have to make two appearances, he will (like all of our industry speakers) speak from 6-7 PM to both sections of this course. This means that Section 1 (full time students) will meet that day from 4-7 PM, and Section 4 (the FEMBA section) will meet from 6-9 PM. I will advise you in advance when there will be a speaker, so that Section 1 students will know when we will be meeting from 4-7 PM and when from 3-6 PM. At this writing, I can tell you that there will be no speaker on October 14, and that there will be speakers every other class except December 9 and 16. November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, is a special case that we will discuss in class.

Week Before First Class

It is necessary to make use of the first week (prior to Class 1) in order to cover all the course material by the end of the quarter. Below are your tasks, with an estimate of the time required for each; please try to finish them by Class 1 on October 7.

Visit the Course Home Page at http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/course/1998-9/fa298d01/. Both sections of this course will use this page.

You are invited to skim certain sections of the readings. Skimming means to roughly double your reading rate by scanning at fairly high speed for material that looks interesting or useful, and slowing down when you find such.

The first five items begin the Introduction to Course and E-Commerce module.

1) [½ hr] Upgrade your laptop to Release 4 of Netscape Navigator (the most popular Web browser), Composer (a Web page editor), and Collabra (a Usenet news group reader) if you are not already running this release. You also need to install WinZip and Adobe Acrobat Reader if you don’t have them yet. Instructions are near the top of the Course Home Page. In addition, Ivan Taylor will walk you through these installations at a special clinic on the first day of class: Section 1 at 3 PM, and Section 4 at 5 PM.

2) [1¾ hr] Read the Introduction, Chapters 1-6, 8, of "The Emerging Digital Economy," U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Washington, D.C., April 1998, in the Course Reader (although packaged separately because it is quite large). Also on-line at http://www.ecommerce.gov/emerging.htm, but this report is far too large to read on-line. This may be a government report, but it is an excellent introduction to e-commerce. Optionally, read Appendix 2.

3) [½ hr] Read Kosiur (one of your texts, namely Understanding Electronic Commerce, Microsoft Press, 1997) Chapter 1, "What is Electronic Commerce?". Notice the deliberately broad view taken of e-commerce and the business process context suggested for viewing it.

4) [¾ hr] Skim "Electronic Commerce Survey," The Economist, May 10, 1997, in the Course Reader. Also on-line at http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/14-9-97/index_survey.html (after free registration). This is an excellent introduction to electronic commerce, and would well be worth a careful reading were your time not so limited. Some things to look for or keep in mind:

• The distinction between business-to-consumer e-commerce (the emphasis of this course) and business-to-business e-commerce (EDI falls in this category).

• The variety of information sources that this article draws upon for Internet/Web/e-commerce activity estimates (e.g., ActivMedia, Forrester Research, Jupiter Communications). We’ll be looking more directly at some of these sources later in the course.

• The early e-commerce experiments that failed. Each has a lesson to teach.

• Web shopper security concerns that may be misplaced, or at least mismatched with some commercial efforts to deal with them.

• The Web’s role in shifting power from merchants to consumers. This is a major theme of your Net Gain text.

• The dehumanized nature of much of the Web, and the humanizing role of Usenet news groups, email lists, chat sites, and Web sites that nurture on-line community.

• The kinds of goods and services that play well on the Web and those that do not.

• The poster children (e.g., Amazon.com, Auto-by-Tel, GE Information Services, Motley Fool).

• Ways in which commercial organizations collect information about their Web visitors.

• The dimensions of competition on the Web (customer service, better product information, price, new ways to add value, etc.).

• The role of intermediaries and middlemen, and the reversal of the early received wisdom about them.

• What to do about Web payments falling under the practical limit of credit cards.

• The likely future of automated price-comparison shopping for a desired product offered by multiple vendors on the Web.

The next item begins the Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce module.

6) [1 hr] HOMEWORK 1: Customer Service Profiles [2 hrs -- 1 hr week 1, 1 week 2 (due)] Explore the Web sites of several conventional businesses that you personally patronize regularly, with special emphasis on their customer services and the value they add to your normal interactions. Select two that seem to be most advanced in this respect. Briefly profile these two in writing. Do not profile mainly Web-based businesses. Some candidate businesses might be AAA, Air Touch, Edison, GTE, LA Times, US Postal Service, VISA, Westec Security, your bank, your long distance carrier, your favorite mail order companies, your favorite radio stations, etc.

Submit your work in hard copy at Class 2. Another homework will ask you to post a Web version of your profiles, so it would be best to write them in Word, which converts easily to (sometimes ugly) Web pages.

Your profiles can be quite short, and you may wish to include some key printed Web pages from the chosen sites. As an example, here are profiles of two companies that your instructor does regular business with:

• Books on Tape http://www.booksontape.com not only contains the full text of its entire 460-page printed tape catalog, but it can be searched in ways that the paper version can’t be; in particular, one can string search the entire catalog all at once (note that this includes every description of every book). Global string search is a powerful way to find books on a given topic.

• Southern California Gas Co. http://www.socalgas.com has a very nice site map, and is very customer service oriented. You can place some kinds of service requests on-line with a simple interactive form, and – with userid and password – you can see your bills and payments and gas usage, with special provision to download this information in spreadsheet format for further analysis. You can even obtain a bar chart of past consumption. There is a demo of the personal information pages with dummy data for non-customers and for customers who have not yet gained access. Personal data is generated on-the-fly from the latest information in the customer databases.

The final item begins the module on the Information Technology Foundations of E-Commerce. (Chapters 1 and 2 of item 2 above also count toward this module.)

7) [1/3 hr] Read Kosiur Chapter 2, "The Importance of the Internet". This is all good material.

• Don’t worry that some of the Internet stats are a bit out of date; we’ll update them in class.

• Notice particularly the OSI Reference Model, which is important. For a little more information on this, visit http://www.uleth.ca/~younk/OSIrefm.htm. This course is mainly concerned with the top layer, but the evolution of the layers underneath can have important ramifications for e-commerce.

• If you hadn’t noticed yet, now is the time if you’re feeling swamped by jargon: the bold-faced text is keyed to a nice Glossary at the back of the book.