Visualising e-business stakeholders on the Web: a methodology and experimental results

Competition among e-businesses has become ever more fierce as electronic commerce is gaining wide acceptance. Meanwhile, effectively collecting and analysing competitive intelligence has challenged researchers and practitioners. This research proposed and validated a new methodology for developing competitive intelligence tools to support e-business stakeholder analysis. We developed a prototype that supports collecting, analysing, and visualising stakeholder Web pages and relationships. Experimental results show that the prototype significantly outperformed a traditional method of stakeholder analysis in terms of user satisfaction and effectiveness on certain task types. This research thus provides a useful methodology and new empirical findings for e-business stakeholder analysis.