E-Commerce: E-Services

Kursbeschreibung / -kommentar

1. Motivation
The term “information technologies” (IT) is obviously most likely associated with the IT sec-tor, software engineers, and robots. However, there are many markets – for example the service sector – that rely particularly on IT. Indeed, in many instances, the entire process of offering, selling, and consuming a service takes place online.
When seller and purchaser never meet face-to-face when realising a business transaction, each step in the business process has to be supported and operationalized with respective technologies and information systems. When offering services, though, there is no need to reinvent the wheel: there are components – so-called “e-services” – that may be combined and reused to cover the entire business process. Whether such components are developed within a company or are outsourced to companies specializing on the respective e-service is an important strategic decision to be made. In both cases, though, it is important for a company to understand all the necessary e-services.
As an umbrella term for services over the Internet, e-services include electronic business transactions for handling online orders, application hosting by Application Service Providers (ASPs) and any processing capability that is obtainable on the Web. Using this e-services concept, any application program is a potential e-service, and Internet service providers (ISPs) as well as other companies are logical distributors or access points for such services.
Despite different definitions of the e-service concept, it can be argued that they all agree about the role of technology in facilitating the delivery of services. And, the Internet is the main channel of e-service delivery. And as such online services are ubiquitous in everyday life, these are also important for the entire society.

2. Learning Outcomes
Course Contents
The objective of this course is to provide an insight into the concept of e-services, their de-livery channels and platforms, as well as management and engineering issues.
The course contents are split into three parts.
In the first part, this course will engage with topics relevant to the question, “What e-services are necessary along a business process and how are these interdependent?” To anticipate the central e-services along a business process right away: provision of the basic infrastructure (for instance, hardware, database structures, interfaces, etc.), database mar-keting (for instance for defining and identifying target groups), information & consulting (for providing general, but also personalized, information about a service), service level agree-ment (SLA) (which is a part of a service contract where a service being sold is formally de-fined and the terms and conditions are specified), delivery (fulfilment of contract), electronic invoicing/billing, and electronic payment. These e-services will first be presented from a theoretical perspective. In doing so, the requirements for information and communication technologies (ICT) will be discussed. Then, these e-services will be discussed and elaborated based on a concrete (real or fictive) service product, which will be agreed upon by the entire group.
The second part of this course introduces information systems that support the central e-services along a business process. We thereby distinguish between access systems as well as support systems in the front and the back office, including, for instance, agent based systems, workflow management systems, workgroup support systems, etc.
The third part of this course first discusses the characteristics of e-services, web services, IT services and virtual services. Then the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is introduced. SOA is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing soft-ware in the form of interoperable services. These interoperable services are often referred to as “e-services”; in most cases, though, we can speak of “web services”. Web services make functional building blocks accessible over standard Internet protocols, which are independ-ent of platforms and programming languages. Thereby, these services can represent either new applications or just wrappers around existing systems to make them network-enabled. From a business perspective, this course discusses SOA’s requirements, benefits and chal-lenges. Simultaneously, the basic SOA protocols are presented, in order to provide students a good overview of the technical issues. The course finally closes with a presentation of the SOA Business Value Assessment procedure.

Learning Outcomes
After attending this course, students are able to
• understand the characteristics of information systems, processes and standards em-ployed in service-oriented organisations,
• understand the properties of the different phases of service processes and the require-ments for information systems serving these phases,
• understand the importance of the different e-services alongside a business process, and the interrelations of those,
• understand the characteristics of e-services, web services, IT services and virtual ser-vices,
• understand the principles of the service-oriented architecture (SOA),
• understand the challenges and benefits of SOA from a business and a technological per-spective.

A particular emphasis will be put on current practices and systems as well on future devel-opments. Students will be able to discuss and reason about the strategic importance of sys-tems enabling e-services to the user.

In addition, this course fosters the following soft skills:
• ability to reason e-service issues,
• ability to comprehend the functionality of the service sector and reason about challeng-es,
• ability to elaborate solutions based on theoretical concepts in a team,
• ability to convincingly present elaborated solutions,
• ability to reflect on one's own performance and express the "lessons learned",
• ability to give constructive feedback and to deal with open criticism.

3. Course Description and Assessment
Mode of Teaching and Learning
The lecture slides serve as key learning material as well as articles and background material on current issues concerning e-services. Material will be available on the course platform.
The course is a mixture of lecturing, written case elaborations, student presentations, and discussion:
• The basic topics will be presented in a lecture.
• The entire group will work on a specific project, whereby student teams will act in the roles of specialists in a specific e-service field. Students are free to propose a real or fic-tive service product; the entire course group has to agree on one project topic.
• In teams, students have to elaborate and submit case elaborations to a specific e-service supporting the entire course project.
• Student teams present their elaborated solutions in class.
• In feedback sessions the student teams will provide feedback on the basis of their “roles” in the entire class project.
• The course design allows plenty of room for discussion of the presented cases and other course-relevant topics.

Assessment
Performance will be evaluated according to following criteria:
• Regular attendance is a prerequisite for passing the course.
• Team case elaboration (25%)
• Team case presentation (25%)
• Final written exam (50%)
• A prerequisite for passing the course is reaching at least 50% (>= 50%) of the achieva-ble exam points.

The following grading system is used:
• 87.5% - 100% = "Sehr gut"
• 75% - 87% = "Gut"
• 62.5% - 74.5% = "Befriedigend"
• 50% - 62% = "Genügend"
• Below 50% = "Nicht Genügend"

If the prerequisite of >= 50% is fulfilled, distinguished participation and commitment in class and on the learning platform (discussion) is positively rewarded by pushing the respec-tive student to the next grade level.

4. References
Bodendorf, Freimut (1999). Wirtschaftsinformatik im Dienstleistungsbereich, Berlin: Springer.
Dahlberg, T., Mallat, N., Ondrus, J., & Zmijewska, A. (2008). Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review. Electronic Commerce Research and Applica-tions, 7(2), 165-181.
Erl, Thomas (2005). Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology & Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall. Chapters 3-6.
Fitzsimmons, James A. (2010). Service management: operations, strategy, and information technology. New York: Mc Graw Hill.
Goo, J., Kishore, R., Rao, H. R., & Nam, K. (2009). The role of service level agreements in relational management of information technology outsourcing: An empirical study. MIS Quarterly, 33(1), 119-145.
McGovern, James, Tyagi, Sameer, Stevens, Michael, & Mathew, Sunil (2003). Java Web Services Architecture. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Chapters 1-7.
Santos, Jessica (2003). E-service quality: a model of virtual service quality dimensions. Managing Service Quality, 13(3). pp 233-246.
Singh, Mohini (2002). E-services and their role in B2C e-commerce. Managing Service Quali-ty, 12(6). pp 443-446.