Evolution of Mobile Location-Based Services
Utilizing user location as a key determinant of information requirement needs.
Practice
Advertisement
Designing Mobile Commerce Applications
Exploring the importance and untangling the complexity of the notion of context.
Mobile Commerce: What It Is and What It Could Be
Just a few years ago, many pundits proclaimed that m-commerce had arrived, and would shortly provide unprecedented commercial functionality to the masses [2, 5]. Cell phone users were expected to be routinely accessing data online [5], and speedy third-generation cellular standards would soon solve associated bandwidth difficulties [2]. It hasn’t quite worked out that way—it […]
A Sociopolitical Look at Open Source
Contemplating the sociological and political aspects of the open source movement.
A Mugwump’s-Eye View of Web Work
Choosing a point of entry into a contemporary software development debate.
As I sit here considering how to introduce this special section on e-services, I'm reminded of a superb experience I recently had filing my U.S. federal income tax return. In lieu of a $400 fee for paying someone to prepare my modestly complex 2002 financial circumstances, and having moved to a new state far from my long-time accountant, I decided to take a chance on one of the new tax filing services available online. This would be, in fact, my first substantial e-services experience as a consumer. Given I was dealing with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the fact that thousands of dollars were at stake, it was no mere exercise to me.
Providing customer services online brought a new dimension to corporate functionalities at Federal Express.
Traditional service marketers moving to e-services find fewer obstacles and more revenue opportunities in the process.
Fulfilling the Web Services Promise
The creation and support of standards for Web services is a critical component to their effective functionality and ultimate success.
A Web service, as defined by the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group, is "a software application identified by a URI, whose interfaces and bindings are capable of being defined, described, and discovered as XML artifacts. A Web service supports direct interactions with other software agents using XML-based messages exchanged via Internet-based protocols."1 Others refine this definition further by requiring the description be a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document and the protocol be SOAP.
E-Service: a New Paradigm For Business in the Electronic Environment
Firms must take full advantage of Net-based e-service opportunities, particularly in the transition of products to services, to garner long-term customer relationships and loyalty.
The Web Services Debate: .net vs. J2ee
According to nearly every industry pundit, including my esteemed (though misinformed) colleague from Sun Microsystems, integration of systems is critically important for most enterprises. The ability to quickly assimilate and aggregate large amounts of information from disparate systems can mean the difference between life and death for an organization. Ease of access by customers and […]
The Web Services Debate: J2ee vs. .net
As the articles in this section attest, the future of Web services is as certain as it is unclear. That is, the Web services arena is most certainly the next technological wave; what is not so clear is what direction (of many) that wave will flow. The challenge of selecting the tools to successfully pull all the components together is particularly daunting.
Technology Enablers to Recover from Failures in E-Services
Although the goal of e-providers should be to provide quality service to all customers at all times, occasional failure is inevitable. Whether the failure is inherent in the content of the e-service (for example, a service that does not meet the expectations of the customer) or in the process (for example, the customer encountered problems with a Web site), the e-provider must be prepared to recover from this failure---a process known as service recovery. Successful service recovery is critical to customer retention and maintaining or possibly increasing customer loyalty [1]. Although service recovery has received a significant amount of attention in the fields of marketing (for example, [2]) and operations management (for example, [3]), the existing concepts must be adapted to the e-service environment. Accordingly, we provide the following seven action items for an e-service provider to remember when it attempts to recover from a service failure:
Data Completeness: a Key to Effective Net-Based Customer Service Systems
To gain and maintain customer loyalty, a firm must learn how to best translate and mine the data they have on those customers.
Marketing Challenges of E-Services
Technological innovations---such as the telephone, television, and the Internet---enable new capabilities that may create long-lasting changes in organizational structure, conduct, and performance. E-commerce currently accounts for a small portion of the U.S. economy, and an even smaller portion of the economies of other developed countries. Hence, marketers imperfectly understand the long-run ramifications of e-commerce for the behavior of buyers and sellers, organizational conduct and performance, the function and evolution of markets, and public policy. For example, there are differences between traditional and computer-mediated buying environments, with the latter characterized by increased information flows, interactivity, reduced information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, and a shift away from geographically based competition. However, the consequences of these features for organizational behavior are (as yet) unclear.
Old saying: "The more things change, the more they remain the same" …or do they?
Software Development Method Tailoring at Motorola
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to be added but when there is nothing left to take away.<br>---Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Building a Successful E-Business: the Fedex Story
The company famous for transporting goods from anywhere to anywhere around the globe has used its impressive information infrastructure to expand into a channel logistics business.
Sorting out Software Complexity
Underlying complexity escalates exponentially: some little-known research findings.
The component paradigm starts with the assertion of an
assembly-oriented view of software engineering, building
software applications by wiring together the ports and
connectors of a set of pre-fabricated parts (components)
within a component context. This paradigm is an evolution of
the notion of the object paradigm: an object having identity,
state, and behavior; a component exposing services,
contracts, and manners and is, most importantly, configurable
without requiring intrusive changes for using it
[1]. Modularization and separation of
concerns (for example, interface from implementation) are key
elements of this paradigm. Parnas stated in 1972 that
modules, or as they have evolved today, components, have
boundaries defined by how we choose to hide, not just data or
methods, but design decisions [2]. These
design decisions often pertain to a component's manners: the
rules governing how it behaves in a context. This
externalization process adds a further dimension of
separation of concerns by allowing data, behavioral
specification, and even a business language to be
externalized as metadata to be used to modify the contextual
behavior of the component at runtime. In this special
section, we explore the problems and solutions encountered in
industry and academia around the world when using the
component paradigm in building software
systems?specifically, to support business domains.
Specification, Implementation, and Deployment of Components
Clarifying common terminology and exploring
component-based relationships.
Overcoming Independent Extensibility Challenges
Independent extensibility requires a strong handle on
versioning through precise names.
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.
Learn More