Term Paper on "Virgin Mobile's E-Business"
Term Paper 5 pages (1582 words) Sources: 4
[EXCERPT] . . . .
Virgin Mobile e-BusinessAssessing Lessons Learned from Virgin Mobile's e-Business
The rapid ascent and continued success of Virgin Mobile as a pay-as-you-go telephone services provider is attributable to the high level of synchronization between the Virgin Group and Sprint. The formation and rapid introduction of services by Virgin Mobile USA is an indication of what can be accomplished when forethought goes into creating an effective Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can support scalable, secure Web Services. The SOA platform also supports 26 different application integration options to ensure that Web Services applications can gain access to the data they need to complete key ordering, pricing, logistics, fulfillment and services functions as well. The forethought that went into creating an SOA framework or platform that can support the nation's first Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) that would scale to 2 million contracts is today one of Virgin Mobile USA's greatest assets. This unique business model, supported by a unique SOA framework and Web Services for managing each phase of a customer relationship and service call, has given the company the ability to keep selling and customer support costs down (Mehta, 2004). In analyzing the lessons learned from Virgin Mobile USA's ability to create a successfully operating Joint Venture with Sprint and integrate legacy systems together to support 2 million contracts, the issues of security, defining critical success factors for e-commerce systems, and the ethics of how those systems are used are provided in this paper.
Critical Success Factors of e-Commerce Systems
Of the
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Another key success factor of any successful website is the development of analytics to track visitors, their behavior, purchase activity and service satisfaction (Ghandour, Benwell, Deans, 2010). The case only alludes to this aspect of the Virgin Mobile USA website from the standpoint of Web Services being able to track overall website activity and traffic. This is however an area of best practices that continues to gain momentum and focus within businesses globally, as analytics is critical for measuring all aspects of online marketing and promotion. The best practice of measuring system performance including the accuracy and transaction speed of the 26 different system connectors is also critically important as well. Virgin Mobile USA has devised an SOA architecture that can quickly scale across their entire business model, delivering consistent results to each of their channel partners, service providers and those visiting online. The breadth and sophistication of their SOA architecture and Web Services shows that analytics is also a core part of their line strategy as well. Any SOA architecture will by definition have an element of analytics within it; the decision of how best to use them to measure ongoing e-commerce success is up to the architects and strategies creating the solutions (Turban, Gehrke, 2000).
In conclusion, it can be seen from the enterprise-wide system strategies the company has taken on that the focus on back office integration creates a stable and secure, scalable and pervasive e-commerce platform to build on. The level and extent of integration is critical for customers to get a consistent response to their queries on pricing, availability, product selection and a consistency to the product ordering process as well. All of these factors are crucial for an e-commerce system to gain and keep the trust of the consumers who use it (McCole, Ramsey, Williams, 2010).
Security
E-commerce platforms and systems vary significantly in their levels of hardened features and scalability, authentication and single-sign-on capabilities (Gomez, Lichtenberg, 2007). They also vary in terms of their customization and integration to legacy systems, which is a critical success factor for Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint combining their systems. The use of security systems in the context of e-commerce needs to be multi-channel and multi-role-based to ensure consistency of protection for online shoppers as well (Fletcher, 2009). The challenges for Virgin Mobile USA include creating a more secured online experience to the browser level, taking into account the literal thousands of browsers on the market today, in addition to modeling each phase of the online ordering process as well. These critical functions can only be accomplished by first taking a more back-office approach to system security and security policy by the Web Services level to ensure secure transactions over time are occurring (Gomez, Lichtenberg, 2007). There is also the need for ensuring the catalog management, pricing and order management systems all stay secure over time as well, with the need for defining validation of each approach and on-ramp to the systems so that user's data can be protected in any and all scenarios they will be logging into the systems under (McCole, Ramsey, Williams, 2010). Finally, Virgin Mobile USA needs to concentrate on creating Web Services dedicated to security alone, so the company can move aggressively forward into new e-commerce and m-commerce initiatives including mobile payments and support for a wider variety of smartphones supported as of 2011.
Ethics of e-Commerce
The conflicting requirements of the Patriot… READ MORE
Quoted Instructions for "Virgin Mobile's E-Business" Assignment:
Term Paper *****
Format: Typed, double spaced, 6 inch line width (minimum), pitch 12, Times Roman numeral, MS Word compatible
Length: Minimum 5 pages of text to be acceptable (pictures and tables are not text), plus bibliography page.
Title Page and/or Table of Contents: Optional and not required.
Subject: Based on any Real World Case Study of Virgin Mobile USA from the textbook (note page on Term Paper so I know where to find it).
Content: The paper should be written about the company in the case and contain information about the current status of the company.
Questions: In the text of your paper, answer the following questions about the case company*****
1. How secure are their electronic payment systems on the Internet? What could be done to make overall electronic commerce more secure?
2. What are several success factors in designing a successful E-commerce website? Explain how the success factors you chose apply to this company*****s success.
3. In general, is there an ethical crisis in E-business today? What role would information technology play in unethical business practices?
Bibliography: Provide a bibliography citing all resources including addresses of web
sites used.
It should be noted that this is a Term Paper and not an assignment to list questions and answer them.
Please see PDF file for case on Virgin Mobile from text book business driven information system, Second edition Baltzan Phillips. page 168 chapter 5
*****
How to Reference "Virgin Mobile's E-Business" Term Paper in a Bibliography
“Virgin Mobile's E-Business.” A1-TermPaper.com, 2011, https://www.a1-termpaper.com/topics/essay/virgin-mobile-e-business-assessing/43189. Accessed 29 Sep 2024.
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