Decision Support Applications in Electronic Commerce

Electronic Commerce (EC) signifies a fundamental shift in how organizations operate, interact, and compete. Decision making is a common thread underlying all EC transactions, shaping all activities in a value chain/supply chain, and feeding off of EC information exchanges. Supporting this decision-making is an important aspect of EC. The overwhelming success of the Internet has opened uncharted opportunities for all organizations to use this technology as a basis for Web-oriented decision support systems(WODSSs). Here, we explore decision support applications that are emerging all along the EC frontier, focusing on those that are delivered across the WWW. This includes the positioning of decision support within the EC realm, a survey of decision support initiatives on the WWW, and the introduction of three taxonomies for guiding study and research: a Subject-Oriented Taxonomy for studying WODSSs used in EC in terms of the subjects about which they can provide knowledge; a Technique-Oriented Taxonomy by which a WODSS is viewed in terms of the knowledge-management technique employed to implement it; and a Coordination-Oriented Taxonomy which deals with the coordination of distributed components of a WODSS. In conclusion, we present some observations about avenues for future research and development of decision support applications in EC.