WEEK 1

Managing e-Operations: Challenges and Opportunities

Synopsis

Revolutionary visions have driven the development of E-Commerce operations. Behind these visions lie many operations decisions, whose execution in some cases has resulted in poor performance outcomes. Operations research and operations management can (and most likely must) be involved in the decisions made for e-Operations.

Readings

Visions

(R) “10 Driving Principles of the New Economy,” Business 2.0, 2000.

http://www.business2.com/content/research/principles/

Slywotsky, A. J., C. Christensen, R. S. Tedlow, and N. G. Carr, “The Future of Commerce,” Harvard Business Review, January-February, 2000.

http://www.hbsp.harvard.edu/products/hbr/janfeb00/R00112.html

(Click on “Order this article” to buy the article in Adobe Acrobat format)

Bakos, Y., “The Emerging Role of Electronic Marketplaces on the Internet,” Communications of the ACM, 41, 8, August 1998, p. 35-42.

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~bakos/emkts-cacm.pdf

Challenges

(R) Lehman, D. “E-Customers Not Satisfied,” Computerworld, March 27, 2000.

http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO44253,00.html

(R) Goldstein, D., “The Distance to Customer Dissatisfaction Just Got Shorter,” Computerworld, October 9, 2000.

http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO52192,00.html

(R) Warner, B., “When Outages Attack,” The Industry Standard, September 20, 1999.

http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,6473,00.html

Operations

(R) Hamm, S. and M. Stepanek, “Why the Productivity Revolution Will Spread: The Net’s Revamping of Old-Line Industry May Save Trillions,” Business Week, March 22, 1999.

http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_07/b3668015.htm

Bhargava, H. K., and R. Krishnan, “The World Wide Web: Opportunities for Operations Research and Management Science,” INFORMS Journal of Computing, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1998.

Note: Read only the following sections: Intro, 1, 2, 7 (We’ll save the rest for Week 4).

Bradley, G. H., and A. H. Buss, “Dynamic, Distributed, Platform Independent OR/MS Applications – A Network Perspective,” INFORMS Journal of Computing, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1998.

Note: Read at a general level. We’ll consider this in more depth during Week 4.