Why Human-Centered e-Business?

In the last few years the Internet has had an enormous impact on businesses and consumers. Figure1.1 shows a comparison of adoption time of Internet as compared with other technologies like personal computer, radio and television. It has taken only four years for the number of Internet users to grow to 50 million compared to sixteen years for personal computer users and thirty-eight years for the radio. The brick-and-mortar companies have had to adapt not only with the pace of the technological change but also the disruptive affect of the Internet enabled e-commerce and e-business technologies. E-commerce and e-business have changed the way people live their lives and the way businesses operate. Many brick-and-mortar companies are still coming to terms with the pace of technological change and recognizing the true competitive advantage of e-business. However, given the technology-enabled nature of e-business, the e-business applications run a similar or higher risk than traditional business applications of being driven by technology-centeredness rather than human-centeredness or customer-centeredness. The stakes are higher than in traditional business applications because organizations embarking on e-commerce and e-business have been forced to look at ways to model customer or user’s expectations from their businesses more explicitly as compared to the conventional business models in traditional commerce.