1. Small and Medium Enterprises (Popularly called SMEs) will ride the wave on e-business offerings. The time has come when even the smallest service provider will leverage m-commerce to advertise his service range for the customer in serviceable range, with the growing popularity of location based services. Everyone with a mobile is potentially reachable through this technology, which is fast increasing in popularity. The fact that Forrester Research predicts m-commerce will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39% through 2016, and that tablet adoption will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 56% per year through 2015, indicates Location Based Services have a really bright future.
2. With the increased popularity of SaaS models in Information Technology offerings, small business can today harness the power of costly powerful technological resources, shared by multiple users, without shelving off millions of dollars. I foresee more and more focus of offerings in the domain of Business Intelligence, which are in a cloud model, for SMEs from the technology service providers. With the resources moved to a cloud, it would be possible to harness the power of ever improving processing capabilities to the available data and then leverage the information and knowledge and gain competitive advantage. The offerings of Business Intelligence on the cloud, should be of the greatest boon to the SMEs and should have a great rate of technology adoption.
3. With the increasing access and penetration of the internet, the years to come may witness a growing proliferation of web based start-up ventures, which may operate purely on a click first e-business model. There may be a splurge of knowledge disseminating service providers or web-based internet marketers leveraging the power of affiliate marketing. However, it would remain to be seen whether this time the wave survives longer than the last wave which crumbled during the dotcom burst of the late 1990s. These pure-click e-business models may be further boosted by the integration of such business with the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the likes of which have seen a faster adoption amongst the consumers than any other technology.
4. With a greater focus on web-based offerings, very soon SMEs will start harnessing the power of open source resources and applications, in the regular operations and transactions. Job monitoring, scheduling, live meeting and communications in general will start being more accessible to the SMEs without deep pockets. This may see a fast growth amongst businesses who are able to assimilate the benefits of the increasingly accessible technological offerings.
5. Last, but not the least, technology may again be leveraged in providing social services. With the increasing focus on social marketing, and the issues centered on triple bottom line, sustainable governance structures may evolve amongst the SMEs which would be heavily leverage on the power of technological advances in general, and e-Business models in particular.

In short the next few years promises to deliver a lot to us. But to what extent the technology evolution and revolution will witness an adoption and assimilation in the SMEs will be interesting to monitor. What do you feel about this era of technological evolution and its impact on SMEs? Write to us.

For example, you are at location X. You suddenly need servicing for your car or gas. Also you are hungry. With Location Based Services enabled on your mobile device, you can be guided to the closest place at the time of your need to the junction that can service your needs in the best possible way. It may be a Gas Station with a food joint.

This is not all. Location Based Services have a very high potential for cross-selling and upselling new services and lower cost of customer acquisition. Intimation of location specific services may be offered to potential customers, and conversion of leads to sales may be extremely high, in certain services. For example, close to a highway, if a joint is present that provides refreshments, and the travelers are intimated of the same during a journey about the same, this may rake in huge benefits.

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing in the era of information technology enabled services (more often internet enabled services), Location Based services are one of the more promising services technology majors are focusing on, due to it extremely high potential revenue generating future. Started first by the 3 majors in 2000, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia,Location Based Services and the research on the service science on the domain has never looked back. The first major full-scale commercial Location Based Service was launched by DoCoMo in Japan , based on triangulation for pre-GPS handsets in 2001. Services like Friendfinder, Yellow pages, houseposition, emergency call location etc. were the first few services that harnessed enormous acceptance from its targeted consumer base across geographies.

Today technology majors like IBM have their own extensive solution for work-force management, that uses platforms for location based management systems. The recent acquisition of GoWalla by Facebook is another such indication that even Social Media majors are considering potential revenue from advertisements from such services. The potential profitability of such services are encouraging the trend, and as more and more focus is increased on the Cloud Computing, these services are bound to be a major revenue earner for technology giants, and can be a crucial ace for the players in the IT services and IT enabled services industry.

While most of these firms are operating on pure click models, some of them even have a tangible existence of a brick & click model.  So why are many of these ventures failing while others are making a progress at a level exceeding 100% YOY growth. Let us examine some of the major issues of some of these portals closely.

1. Many of these portals, which are attempting to sell a product or a service do not have a proper facilitating gateway to make payments. In the web, it is important to understand that the buyers are limited to pay for your service or products, by the way it is allowed within their nation. Not all countries allow Paypal, not all countries have VISA credit cards. Keeping more than one option for payment is absolutely crucial.
2. Many of the portals do not have visibility on the web. To be able to sell a service on the web, it is crucial that you appear on the first page of every major search engine when someone searches for that product or service. While launching a website like that, it is imperative to have the best search engine optimization strategies in place. Sometimes it is good to take consultancy from professionals about how to go about it, if you are not sure. A small investment in the early days can take you a long way.
3. A major problem for these start-ups is that often they have no clearly defined target segment, and thus there is no fixed positioning of the web-site. So the same site may be used to sell two very different  product category (Say t-shirts and video games) and yet it is definitely not a generic e-shop or e-market. So web search engines tend to get confused from the tags that are built for search engine optimization.
4. Most of these portals do not attempt to cross-sell or up-sell new products or services to existing or new customer. It has been seen that cross-sell or up-sell buy value can be as high as 100% for an existing customer, and sometimes even higher. An easy way to achieve this is through the application of recommender systems in the e-commerce portals. There are many popular recommender systems and engines like Avail Intelligence, Baynote, Certona, Omniture and RichRelevance. All these engines can provide the customer other product options based on his preferences at the point of sales conversion.
5. Finally, another grave strategic error that one encounters in such sites are the lack of well developed graphical user interface, that will enable a good surfing experience for every potential customer. Today when there are so many free blogging engines like WordPress and Bloggers, it becomes too easy to create a website. Choosing a proper theme that will facilitate the browsing and thus the shopping experience in your portal, is key to your success. While using a paid premium theme is always advisable to get a custom look and feel of the theme, if the pockets are really shallow, using a free theme is not too bad for a start. Then, when the sales start rolling in the Moollah, it would be a good decision to switch to a premium theme.

Please do let me know how you are faring after following these simple steps. There are many intricacies in managing an e-commerce portal, but I will discuss more on that later.

The article “A Framework for Research in Computer Based MIS” by Blake Ives, Scott Hamilton, Gordon Davis talks about 5 major research models by “Mason & Mitroff”, “Chervany, Dickson & Kozar”, “Lucas”, “Mock” & “Gorry & Scott Morton”. It also forecasts a model to generate future potential hypotheses for research. In the Mason & Mitroff Model, the focus is on defining the IS as A person of a certain Psychological type who faces a problem within some organizational context for which he needs evidence to arrive at a solution, where the evidence is made available through some mode of presentation. In the research by Chervany, Dickson & Kozar, the focus is on the isolation of dependent and independent variables which determine effectiveness of an IS.  Lucas formed a descriptive model of situational, personal & attitudinal variables & their impact on usage of the system & performance of the IS user, where behavioral issues have been studied in depth. Mock studied how behavioral constraints on system developers and users, impact the usage of the system and their individual performances. Gory and Scott Morton focused on how an IS provides information for management decision making. The authors of the paper designs a model with 3 IS environments, 3 IS processes & 1 IS subsystem, existing within an Organizational & External environment. On the basis of interaction between the variables of these types, the author divides IS research into broadly 5 types, 1 to 5, which again are subdivided into multiple subtypes. The framework focuses on providing a basis to formulate a hypothesis which is relevant to MIS research.

The article “The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining & communicating the disciplines core properties” by Isaac Bensbasat & Robert Zmud, focuses on what is IS research all about and how to make it a distinct area of research. He focuses on how to build IS research by investigating closely related areas than distant issues. He states the 3 requirements for IS research, that of claimed central character, claimed distinctiveness and claimed temporal continuity required for IS research to evolve as a discipline. He stresses on the need for an identity in the MIS field by obtaining cognitive & socio-political legitimacy. The authors are concerned that the Interdisciplinary nature of IS cause application of varied theories from multidisciplinary backgrounds which is important for building theory but may dilute the focus of research. They express their concerns of errors of exclusion of core constructs & errors of inclusion of non-core construct in studies of IS and IT artifacts. The core properties focusing on the managerial, methodological, technological, operational, behavioral issues and the impacts of IT should be studied in IS research, in the context of the nomological net. IS research should also investigate relationships involving 1/more core constructs only, and heavy reliance on theories of reference disciplines to achieve legitimacy should be minimized.

The article “MIS RESEARCH: Reference disciplines & a Cumulative tradition” by Peter Keen also focuses on suggesting a way in which MIS research may evolve into a classical discipline having its own identity. He states that the concept of having microeconomics & computer science as the reference field limits the scope of MIS research. The researchers should focus on defining the dependent variable in their study and build on the work done by predecessors. The research should now focus on building theory from multiple reference disciplines to help IS keep evolving as a discipline and not build frameworks only. The research should not be dependent on technology evolution but focus on management, information and systems issues. Since MIS as a discipline has strong implications for practice, the focus on theoretical research should not be diluted. The focus of the researchers should be to publish in quality IS journals. Research should focus on the management of the use of technology to benefit business processes and resolve technical, managerial & organizational issues.

All 3 papers focus on mentioning the scope of IS research and what researchers should focus on in the future. They stress on the need for building theory to make MIS evolve as a discipline, and not be too dependent on reference disciplines for the purpose. Also they stress ways to evaluate if a research is actually investigating issues closely related to IS or not. Also they stress on how hypotheses formulation should be done for research in IS and what should the constructs aim to achieve.

There are many popular technology products for customer sentiment mining.

Typically, these products analyze e-mails and telephonic conversations to decide if it is a complaint or a query and forwards it to most suitable agent for immediate resolution thus increasing agent productivity. They can also perform both structured and unstructured data analysis to understand & quantify customer satisfaction, display customer details and past communication, prioritize complaints based on customer satisfaction level the value of the customer, update customer contact details in the data warehouse, and also helps to differentiate services to HNI and LNI clients.

Sometimes, these data-mining systems can even create customized email/sms/ automated phone call campaigns for the marketer to increase revenue from cross-selling and up-selling, analyze customer preferences post campaign-creation, analyze customer actions post email reading, generate reports to facilitate management decision making process (which can be integrated with the existing other report generation tools)and also helps to analyze productivity of agents and channels.

A feature-wise competitive analysis of the 15 most popular instruments available in the market for customer sentiment mining can be obtained on request to arpan.kumar.kar@gmail.com. The comparative report is easy to understand with charts implying a comparison of features an is priced $350 only.