D. Petkov
1
,O. Petkova
2 , M. D’Onofrio 2
, and G. S. Fry
3
1
Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic CT, petkovd@easternct.edu
2
Central Connecticut State University, New Britain CT, School of
Business, MIS, petkovao@ccsu.edu
; donofrio@ccsu.edu
3
University of Natal, South Africa, garethf@msmail.cs.unp.ac.za
ABSTRACT
The recent decline of industry interest in e-commerce poses many questions for management and IS research. One such question is what makes small IT companies’ web development practices for e-commerce successful. Such companies do not usually have the expertise to apply sophisticated software development management concepts. This paper addresses the need for an innovative interdisciplinary approach that can reconcile the frictions between the technical aspects and the social science aspects of software development. The authors report on their work in progress towards the design of a system for promoting improved understanding of the Critical Success Factors for e-commerce development. The purpose of the system is to support knowledge accumulation for improvement of web development practices within a regional community of small IT companies.
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INTRODUCTION
E-commerce may have suffered recently from a decline of industry interest towards it but “it is not a fad, a trend or fashion that we will soon discard” (Kendall and Kendall, 2001). There is a growing consensus in the research community about the need to observe and explain the paradoxes and other phenomena related to ecommerce when engaging in management and IS research in a networked economy
(see Klein, 2001; Kendall and Kendall, 2001). Such research issues are what drives web software development and what contributes to the success of small IT companies developing web software. First, web technology is the foundation of ecommerce and many aspects surrounding it are still evolving. Second, small IT companies do not usually have the expertise to apply sophisticated software development management concepts in their practice. They may have certain common features but at the same time they are affected by local, regional economic and cultural factors. Investigating dynamically these aspects of ecommerce related software development and providing feedback to the small IT businesses may provide new opportunities for improvement of web development practices. This is one of the driving ideas behind this research.
A manager should be continually aware of the current level of performance in each of the critical areas of a business as a basis for decision-making (Holsapple and Whinston, 1996). Ward and Griffiths (1997) report that the current status of performance in each area should be constantly measured and that information about that should be made widely available. A suitable technique for that is the
Critical Success Factor (CSF) theory (see Rockart, 1979). It has been widely applied in many aspects of Information Systems and Technology Management (see
Teo and Ang, 1999 and others). More recently, CSFs in software development were investigated by (Reel, 1999) and Tackett and Van Doren (1999). In another publication, Liu and Arnett (1999) empirically study the factors associated with web site success in electronic commerce.
The question which one needs to ask is how applicable are the findings of the above studies to different organizations and especially to small IT companies in different countries. Due to the uniqueness of the conditions surrounding small IT companies in different geographic regions, the transferability of conclusions from such studies cannot be considered without taking into account the local situation in a particular country. Thus, there is a need to gather data on CSFs in e-commerce web development that is locally relevant to a particular region. Another problem is how to deal with the lack of expertise within small IT companies on the theory of
CSFs. The above two questions have management implications when considered at the level of the individual small IT company. They have also a social aspect given the considerable percentage of employees of those small IT companies and their overall role for the health of a given regional and national economy. These two aspects (management and social) of web software development seem to be far less researched compared to the technical side of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet, the dominating technology in the IT industry over the last decade.
Along with Klein (2001) and on the basis of the above, it can be concluded that there is a need for an innovative interdisciplinary approach to e-commerce research, including web software development. Such an interdisciplinary approach should aim to reconcile the frictions between the technical aspects and the social science aspects of the problem of improving web software development practices.
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The researchers suggest an innovative approach towards improvement of the understanding of what drives web software development in small IT companies. They aim to provide a solution considering the need for dynamic decision support for the management of small IT companies on the issue of CSFs in web development in the conditions of their region or country. The contribution of this research is that it shows how a traditional corporate IT management tool as the theory of CSFs can be made available to a regional community of small IT businesses through appropriate technology and implementation methodology.
Another reason for the theoretical and practical contribution of this work is that it shows how community informatics ideas can be applied to enable the diffusion of a traditional method in IS management as the CSF theory into the small IT sector. To the authors’ best knowledge the problem of identification of CSFs in web development in small IT companies has not been researched previously.
This paper is organised as follows: the next section presents an overview of the theory of CSF applied to web software development, followed by a discussion on the methodological issues in the implementation of a project, enabling the application of CSF theory to web software development. Then a description of the practical work by the authors so far on this project is presented. A discussion about the lessons learned and possible directions for further work concludes the paper.
CURRENT ISSUES IN RESEARCH ON CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS
APPLIED TO E-COMMERCE WEB DEVELOPMENT
Critical Success Factors can be defined as a small number of easily identifiable operational goals shaped by the industry, the firm, the manager, and the broader environment that are believed to ensure the success of an organization.
If these goals can be attained, the success of the firm or organization is ensured.
(Rockart, 1979). Usually fewer than ten critical success factors exist per business.
The principle method used in CSF analysis is personal interviews with top managers to identify their goals and the resulting CSFs.
Early experience in building software systems showed that existing methods for software development were not good enough (see for a broader discussion Pfleeger, 2000). Techniques applicable to small systems could not be scaled up, major projects were sometimes years late, they cost much more than originally predicted, were unreliable, were difficult to maintain and performed often not to expectations. One of the ways to change this situation is through greater emphasis on the critical success factors in IS development.
The critical success factor method has attracted considerable attention as a means of supporting both MIS planning and requirements analysis (Boynton and
Zmud, 1984). Although various researchers indicated that their experiences in applying the critical success factor method have been quite successful, there has been some debate regarding the strengths, weaknesses and appropriate use of critical success factors as an IS methodology. The critical success factor approach has grown as a method of identifying the information requirements of executives within organizations. This approach has been expanded by Bullen and Rockart
(1981) into a Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) methodology. Bullen and Rockart (1981) define critical success factors as follows:
"Critical success factors are the limited number of areas in which satisfactory results will ensure successful competitive performance for the individual, department, or organization. Critical success factors are the few key areas where "things must go right" for the business to flourish and for the manager's goals to be attained.”
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More recently, Fidler and Rogerson (1996) state that the critical success factor approach has enjoyed widespread popularity within the field of IS strategy development mainly because of its intrinsic conceptual simplicity and its relatively small use of resources. This is one of the reasons the researchers have considered this approach as suitable for small IT businesses.
In essence critical success factors are those few things that must go well to ensure success for a manager or an organization and therefore they represent those managerial or enterprise areas that must be given special and continual attention to bring about high performance (Boyton and Zmud, 1984). The key to success for most managers is to focus their most limited resource (their time) on those aspects that really make the difference between success and failure (Bullen and Rockart,
1981).
The critical success factor methodology is a process that attempts to make clear those few key areas that dictate organizational or managerial success. Critical success factors emerge from structured dialogues (interviews), or structured questionnaires between a skilled critical success factor analyst and key personnel of an organization. Critical success factors should be elicited from managers who represent a cross-section of the organization' s major functional areas.
According to Ward and Griffiths (1997), critical success factors enable management to use their judgment in two ways:
 to assess the relative importance of systems opportunities in terms of how well they support the achievement of business objectives; and
 to identify the information required by management to manage and plan business executives' information needs. As they indicate, it is always better to have a crude measure of something important, rather than a refined measure of something that does not matter. Critical success factors help to differentiate the two.
The idea behind CSF theory is simple: in any organization certain factors will be critical to the success of that organization, in the sense that, if objectives associated with the factors are not achieved, the organization will fail. According to Pollalis and Frieze (1993), the concept of critical success factors is easy to apply, flexible and does not require a rigorous format in their use. This offers an advantage as critical success factors can be tailored to different applications (as seen in the growing number of uses proposed for critical success factors in IS and other organizational domains). A disadvantage is that the flexibility of critical success factors may lead to an overly casual approach to their application. If this occurs, the critical success factors will communicate invalid signals to both analysts and users.
Critical success factor analysis is a powerful and "deservedly popular technique" in IS strategy planning and business planning (Ward and Griffiths,
1997). Thierauf (1982) notes that in addition to its use by top management and the corporate planning staff, critical success factor analysis is useful at each level of general management. Thierauf also suggests that a computerized system supporting CSF analysis should be capable of producing reports to accommodate changes in the organization's critical success factors. This research extends this initial idea through the application of Internet technology allowing the dynamic gathering of CSF data from diverse small IT companies in a region or country.
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Sprague and Watson (1996) indicate that the critical success factor process can also be used to identify critical failure factors (CFFs). CFFs are developments that can significantly impair performance (e.g.
a strike or environmental damage are potential critical failure factors for many organizations). While a critical failure factor may not come to mind readily when thinking of success, its occurrence can have disastrous consequences.
In a recent paper detailing the critical success factors involved in software projects, Reel (1999) indicates that in order to achieve success in software projects, developers need to identify factors crucial to their projects. Five factors have been indicated by Reel: start on the right foot; maintain the momentum; track progress; make smart decisions; and conduct a post-mortem analysis.
Through the identification of critical success factors for each project, organizations learn to identify what they need to change to improve their ultimate chances for success. This concept holds true also for e-commerce software development. Software development is a very complicated activity that requires the correct identification of many factors in order to succeed. This is particularly relevant for small software companies that are specialising in e-commerce and web development. They typically do not have the expertise and the human resources needed to implement a technique like CSFs. The field of web development is large and important, yet it is a relatively new area. The Internet is one of the fastest growing technologies around the world. Many cultural aspects associated with ecommerce software development practices in different geographic areas are not investigated yet. Hence the need to provide a tool for dynamic investigation of
CSFs in e-commerce software development in a regional context is evident.
The above discussion raises the question about the methodology that needs to be applied in order to implement a computerised system providing facilities to gather data on CSFs related to e-commerce software development in a local context, which is discussed in the following section.
SOME METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE
IMPLEMENTATION OF A SYSTEM ENABLING THE APPLICATION OF
CSF THEORY TO E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN
SMALL IT COMPANIES
The critical success factor approach has been applied before through data gathering in the form of personal interviews with respective managers to identify their own goals, information needs and the resulting CSFs. The application of CSF theory is usually preceded by stakeholder identification and analysis. The gathering of data from a predetermined set of respondents depending on the chosen sampling technique is a complex task on its own but its nature is deterministic. The analysis that is produced is usually linked to a fixed set of phenomena and stakeholders to be studied within a fixed period of time.
The research discussed here is characterised by several factors that make it quite different and more complicated than the traditional way of applying CSF theory in IS research in the last twenty years:

The stakeholders are too many and dispersed geographically within the region of concern;

The stakeholders do not have much expertise about the details of the
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CSF theory and how it can be useful to them;

The nature of the activities of small IT companies and their environments are typically very dynamic and this needs to be captured by a method for implementation of CSF theory in such a situation

Small IT companies may not have the financial resources to support such an investigation.
The above provides ideas on the system requirements necessary to arrive at a solution to the problem at hand. It is evident that the system has to allow dynamic data gathering, automated processing of the results and their dissemination. It has to implement the principles of the critical success factor methodology since the latter has proven itself in the corporate IT environment in the past. However, in this case we do not deal with an uniform corporate environment. Therefore the implementation of such a solution in practice requires additional research to find the best approach for the diffusion of the intended solution into the practice of small IT companies. The latter issue seems to be most difficult as it leads to questions that have been insufficiently researched within the IS discipline in the past.
Glass (2001) provides a useful summary of opinions of IS researchers related to the issues of rigor and relevance in IS publications. He indicates that some of the researchers in the IS community are not considering that the discipline should only passively survey phenomena in the IT industry with a certain time lag.
The authors of this paper see that as an indication of the need to pay more attention to design aspects in information systems research, which is in keeping with the views expressed by Hevner (see Mathieu, 2002). Glass (2001) also espouses the necessity of finding ways and tools to make IT management ideas more accessible to practitioners. The implementation of such tools requires a better recognition of the socio-technical nature of information systems development in general and in web software development in particular. It is proposed here that the design of such a tool enabling gathering of CSFs from many dispersed small IT companies may benefit from some ideas of Community Informatics (CI).
According to Gurstein (2001), Community Informatics is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives…and particularly to support local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment using the Internet”. The understanding of Community Informatics is extremely diverse. Some are considering CI to be a new emerging discipline. According to
Gurstein (2001), CI draws resources and participants from a wide range of backgrounds including Computer Science, Management, Information and Library
Science, Planning, Sociology, Education, Social Policy and Rural, Regional and
Development Studies. The authors’ opinion is that it is too early to identify CI as a new discipline since the various researchers in it seem to have transferred individual philosophical and methodological assumptions from their own disciplines into this new area and only time will tell if something new emerges showing the synergy between the source fields listed above. The authors acknowledge that there is a process towards the formation of such a new discipline but for the time being it can be as well as successfully considered as a collection of many sub-fields within established disciplines. Possible related fields include
Computer Mediated Communications (see Turoff et al (1999)), Virtual
Communities (see Bieber et al. (2002)) and Community Information Systems (see
Moggridge, 2001). In our opinion, it is premature to conclude that CI is either a
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new integrative interdisciplinary field or that it can be seen as developments within existing disciplines as only future practice will provide evidence for judging the direction CI will take.
The above discussion points to the potential of some ideas from
Community Informatics to be applied in the development of a tool enabling the diffusion of the CSF concept (applied traditionally in large corporate environments) to the small business field and its deployment. These discussion points were explored in the authors’ work on the design of a solution to the problem of identifying CSFs for e-commerce software development in small IT companies, and are considered in the next section.
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SYSTEM FOR IDENTIFICATION OF
CSFs FOR E-COMMERCE DEVELOPMENT IN SMALL IT COMPANIES
AND SOME LESSONS FROM THIS WORK
Why is the work reported here related to community informatics? The reason is that small IT businesses are more often micro businesses, employing several people only. Hence their behaviour in the economy is often similar to that of a single person. They face similar resource related problems as individual citizens, small communities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). They are usually participating in small business alliances on a regional basis, within an industry, or in regional professional societies.
A possible solution can help small IT companies improve their understanding of what drives web-based software development through better evaluation of these practices. They need to share these experiences together and learn from each other as part of their involvement with professional societies. They need a tool that can take away from them the need to develop internal expertise on organising and collecting data on CSF theory. Such a tool aims to externalise
(articulating implicit knowledge into explicit concepts) the understanding of the individual IT experts on CSFs in e-commerce development, along the ideas on knowledge management of Bieber et al. (2002).
On the basis of the discussion so far, it is possible to outline the methodological assumptions for such a solution:
it needs to implement the principles of the CSF theory;
it needs to support learning in a distributed environment.
The technology of such a solution has to address the following requirements:
the solution needs to be based on a distributed IT infrastructure allowing access anytime from anywhere, such as the one provided by the Internet and the World Wide Web;
the tools for development need to address issues of compatibility with the most widely used web technologies in the world and the latest trends in this fast moving field;
organizational learning can be provided by exploring the latest achievements in the construction of knowledge portals.
The practical work by the authors on this problem to date is described below. The product of the ideas described in this paper is an evolving interactive
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web based system for gathering and supplying information on critical success factors in web development, which is used to continuously update the collected data.
The work reported here has had two prototype implementations and is still in progress. One project was implemented in South Africa at the University of
Natal in 2001 under the supervision of the first and second authors. The web site was designed to allow the users to:

 learn about critical success factors in web development; submit their own information of critical success factors in web development within their small IT company.
The implementation of the first prototype required contacting relevant small IT businesses within the province of Kwa Zulu Natal. This dimension of the project could be seen as a form of action research as the developing team was interacting with the local branch of the Computer Society of South Africa (CSSA).
The latter provided a list of possible small IT companies to be considered for the survey and was interested in sharing the results obtained with the local members of the society. The involvement of the CSSA local branch was a successful move since the committee members’ enthusiasm and dedication to the project was consistently high.
A second project on CSFs in e-commerce projects was implemented with postgraduate students from the Masters Program in Computer Information Systems at Central Connecticut State University under the supervision of the second and third authors in 2002. It concentrated more on the task of creating awareness about the CSF theory and its role in web development in general. It simulated a training environment on the role of CSFs in e-commerce.
A common weakness of both projects was the fact that the deployment of the two prototypes did not capture the attention of broader sections of the regional small IT companies. In the second case that was not even a prime objective for the developing team. There is a need to refine the intervention mechanism during the development of such a solution. This can be achieved following the process of action research advocated by Checkland and Holwell (1998). Not enough attention was paid to the potential for a possible cooperation with a local chamber of commerce and industry. The latter type of institution may potentially be more directly concerned with the needs of small IT companies in a region than a professional organization such as a computer society.
Further work is needed on integrating the best aspects of both projects into one system and using it for gathering more field data on CSFs on e-commerce web development by small IT businesses in a particular regional context. The challenge for further enhancements of the proposed solution is to apply methods for human enquiry that will improve the deployment strategy for such a tool. Possible methods may include stakeholder analysis and Soft Systems Methodology (see
Checkland and Holwell, 1998). These methods can contribute to the development of the application domain knowledge about the problem. The latter is important as the software project management area and the small business area are not traditional IS application domains.
CONCLUSION
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The ideas presented in this paper show how a traditional corporate management approach such as CSF theory applied to e-commerce development can be made accessible to small IT businesses over the Internet. It cannot be expected that such businesses would have the in-house expertise to apply this approach alone. These businesses need assistance in the form of environment providing them with n opportunity to learn about CSFs and share their experiences.
At the same time they gain from the opportunity to explore not only data related to their own critical success factors but also to those that are relevant for related types of businesses within the IT industry. Thus through the technological infrastructure of the Internet (which traditionally has been the center of attention in Community
Informatics) is suggested a novel approach for applying a corporate management approach such as CSFs. It aims to assist in the management of knowledge creation about CSF related to e-commerce and web software development within the virtual community of small IT companies in a particular region.
An interactive web site for online gathering of information on CSFs in web development projects was developed in two prototype versions. Two issues are addressed by the evolving project, learning and sharing. Learning allows the user to gather information on which factors are critical to the success of a project in web development.
Overall the challenge for further development is to enhance the system to provide an extensive interactive learning experience for the users about CSFs in web software development within small regional IT companies. Future work could involve wider field research in different regions of the world, gathering data on critical success factors for web development in small IT businesses and possibly for the maintenance of e-commerce projects is needed. Thus the development of the proposed tool can contribute to empowering small IT companies to produce better e-commerce systems.
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