|
|
 |
The 13th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference
Krassie Petrova |
The 13th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference "Electronic Commerce - The End of the Beginning" (June 2000) was held, following its long standing tradition, in the town of Bled - a pleasant Slovenian lake resort near the Austro-Slovenian border. The main organizer of the conference is the University of Maribor; closely associated are research institutions such as the Center for the Study of Electronic Commerce (University of Denver - USA) and the Institute for Information Management (University of St Gallen - Switzerland). International IT companies (SAP, ORACLE, IBM, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble) are sponsors of some of the events.
Conference format
Three separate programmes were presented: a research track, a business track, and a postgraduate e-commerce student bazaar. In the research track, the major topic areas were:
- Frameworks for the analysis of electronic commerce
- Human-computer interaction. Trust. Web-based services.
- Small and medium-sized enterprises. Strategic and transitional issues
- Electronic transactions, EDI, protocols, law and security issues.
- Educational issues in teaching electronic commerce and Web-based technologies.
Conference participants and discussion forums
Presenters and conference delegates came from different European, American, Asian and Australian universities. A large number of the universities represented already offer some qualifications in e-Business. In the discussion forums, questions were raised about:
- The need to respond quickly to the changes in the technological environment
- The need to offer high quality education, and
- The content, cost and relative value of the effort to do the above.
Teaching e-commerce - some research highlights
Expected stability
Some of the research suggested that even though the information technology and electronic business area are changing very dynamically, and at present e-commerce graduates do not have a very clear picture of their future jobs and cannot know how easy it would be to find employment, over the next few years the e-commerce employment market will stabilize and conform to the patterns observed in other industries (Chan & Swatman, Electronic Commerce Careers: A preliminary Survey of the Online Marketplace).
Networked classrooms
A special case of electronic commerce is the network-enabled mode of studying. In their analysis of the case of the iMBA (Interactive MBA) degree at the Faculty of Business, CU of Hong Kong, Vogel & Klassen (Networked Learning as Electronic Commerce: Cultural Changes in a Faculty) observe that IT has changed the culture of management as well as the culture of teaching and learning, and that the changed paradigm of tertiary education is most demanding in terms of advanced preparation - new program design and new policies.
E-commerce and other disciplines
Among other topics of research interest, the effort applied to finding the place and position of e-commerce among other related disciplines, the use of the TCP/IP structure of the Internet for providing uniform access to services, the adoption of electronic business by small and medium sized enterprises, Internet banking, security of electronic transactions and the use of EDI and extranets for business-to-business connectivity should be mentioned.
E-commerce and information technology
Three papers of interest to the developer of a course on information technology for electronic business: the expansion of a retail company through the Internet (a case study; in Dell: Selling Directly, Globally by Fthoomand & Ng), the analysis of the influence of Website content on Website traffic in The Impact of Perceived Website Characteristics on Website Traffic (Hejden) and the analysis of the role of virtual shopping environment in "Virtual Store Atmosphere" in Internet Retailing (Vrechoupoulos & Doukidis) discuss various managerial implications related to the introduction of IT infrastructure for business-to-consumer electronic commerce into an organization.
Business track and student bazaar
The business track themes focused on electronic commerce development in business, electronic commerce in Government, and accelerating electronic commerce development in small countries. Several plenary sessions took place - among the most interesting were the ones on "Challenges in current electronic commerce technology development" and "Global electronic commerce projects of the future; opportunities for collaboration", and the traditional workshop on "Key Research Issues in Global Electronic Commerce" took place under the facilitation of Doug Vogel. The graduate students bazaar presented electronic commerce prototypes and electronic business projects completes by students at the University of Maribor.
Follow-up conferences
The next, 14th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference "e-Everything: e-Commerce, e-Government, e-Household" in 2001 is going to be held in conjunction with the 9th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2001 "Global Cooperation in the New Millennium").
Attendance funded by "E-business Qualifications Development Project", Faculty of Business Auckland University of Technology
|
|
|
