Assessment of the impacts of e-commerce technologies on overall business processes: an analytic Delphi process

The Internet has dramatically changed our lives and the way we do business. With the innovation of e-commerce companies can reach customers and sell products almost instantaneously. As an outcome, e-commerce has grown tremendously and the rapid changes taking place in information technology in conjunction with the dynamic nature of the market provide rich opportunities for research. This research assesses emerging e-commerce technologies and the impact of these technologies on overall business processes. The methodology utilized is an analytic Delphi study where experts assessed the adoption of e-commerce technologies and the impacts of these technologies on overall business processes. Delphi offered a mechanism to make these assessments via a panel and was the chosen methodology because the Internet is a relatively new technology and thus, sufficient historical data were not available to effectively utilize other traditional forecasting methodologies. Once the initial e-commerce technologies were identified via traditional Delphi, the analytic hierarchy process was used to quantify expert's judgments. The research methodology required a team of twelve e-commerce experts to respond to three sets of research instruments. The results of the research quantify the impact of major e-commerce technologies and business change agents as identified by the experts in the study.