Designing for ROI: toward a value-driven discipline for e-commerce systems design

E-business management is an on-going process of understanding consumer needs and developing online solutions to meet those needs. To be effective in today's competitive environment of e-commerce, e-businesses cannot afford to neglect justifying the return on investment (ROI) of their online operations. Ideally, companies would like to understand how users are using their Web site and how this translates into value creation (or value leakage) so that online solutions can be implemented to increase business performance. However, the current situation is that such value-driven management is not possible due to the lack of tools and methods that can provide a clear link between systems design and business performance. This paper presents a value-driven systems design methodology for e-commerce Web sites. The focus of our methodology is on identifying value-creating opportunities and value-diminishing problems through the analysis of actual customer Web site usage behaviors through Web usage mining. The identification of value-creating opportunities and value-diminishing problems enables us to plan for designing additional Web site features and for redesigning existing functionalities to increase business performance and maximize design ROI.