Mobile business : An exploratory study to define a framework for the transformation process

The advent of frontier technologies such as wireless technology has given the necessary impetus for businesses to transform from traditional ways into digital ways. While the Internet transformed traditional businesses to e-businesses, wireless technology enabled to move further to mobile business or m-business. Despite the development in the technical domain, businesses still struggle to comprehend the processes involved in the transformation and a proper framework is yet to evolve. This work-in-progress paper provides a background to such transformation with a method to achieve this transformation. Introduction Research firms such as Shop.org and Forrester Research, based on the growth rate of on-line retail sales, estimated that $100 billion has been achieved in 2004, representing 4.5 percent of total retail sales. Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is expected to grow worldwide to $4.3 trillion by 2005 according to International Data Corp (IDC) (Lumpkin and Dess, 2004). Due to the advent of wireless technology, it is believed that parts of e-commerce will take place through wireless devices (Zabala, 2000), and create a large market for many industries because wireless technology offers mobility and flexibility. The mobile Internet is transforming employees, supply chains, and customer interactions by facilitating new innovations, cost-reduction, and revenue opportunities (Kalakota and Robinson, 2001). For example, PDAs support a wide variety of enterprise-level applications in fields ranging from industrial manufacturing to the airline industry to healthcare, and business and personal productivity applications range from document readers to street maps and vacation planners (Kumar and Zahn, 2003). Carlsson (2002) indicates that cyber economy will combine traditional business with new eand mobile business, and will be driven by a new breed of online customers, who operate both wired and wireless networks, who will expect fast delivery, easier transactions and more fact-based information. It appears that mobile (m-) commerce is not included in the traditional e-commerce market models despite that fact that m-commerce will be able to increase the overall market for e-commerce, because of its unique value proposition of providing easily personalized, local goods and services anytime and anywhere" (Durlacher Research Ltd, 2000; Clarke, 2001). A reason for this may be due to the fact that mobile commerce followed e-commerce models and the lag in time. While discussing about e-business success factors, Porter (2001) argued that companies that use the Internet in conjunction with their traditional business models will improve their activities leading to success and the same argument can be applied to m-business as well. Therefore, it is important to provide an effective and efficient framework for