| Business use of the Internet technology is recent and is increasing at a fast pace. Although Internet holds a unique promise for businesses, there is a lack of stable models and frameworks to plan for incorporating it in businesses. This is reflected in the way Internet has been largely used by businesses--as static web pages which serve as electronic billboards for enterprises, or to exchange documents through corporate intranets. The promise of the Internet technology extends way beyond enabling such tasks. Internet, essentially, is an enterprise information integration technology and such integration has tremendous implications for transaction cost savings for businesses. Because of such wide ranging capabilities and promise of this technology for businesses, a "push" model for Internet strategy planning is proposed--that an enterprise plans for strategic use of Internet in view of the capabilities of the technology itself. In actualizing this "push" model into a concrete planning framework, we make use of a reference model for Internet goal setting for an enterprise. These goals, in turn, are mapped onto business processes of the enterprise. A redesigning of the business processes to align them with the Internet goals is a major component of the framework. The redesigned business processes are then employed through a structured methodology like data flow diagramming to design Internet-based information systems. This framework is empirically tested in two industrial situations. In the Korea Long Term Credit Bank (KLB) case, the reference model is used to generate Internet goals for the Bank and, subsequently, to redesign their processes. Based on the initial plan generated for the Bank, they have embarked on establishing an Internet based on-line bank and are a test-bed for the rest of the planning framework. The second industrial case is a study of a conglomerate heavy machinery and ship builder, Samsung Heavy Industries Co., Ltd. (SHI) of Korea. This case demonstrates application of the planning framework to an existing major business process redesign project. Starting with the question what will be different for that project if Internet technology were to replace traditional IT in the firm, the framework prescribes a number of goals in the areas of marketing and sales and after sales service for the firm. These goals are then used to drive a business process redesign and Internet-based systems design details for a subsystem of the marketing and sales system. Additional cases taken from the literature are also analyzed to establish the usefulness of the reference model and the planning framework. |
