Businesses as Buildings: Metrics for the Architectural Quality of Internet Businesses
Authors: Kim, Jinwoo; Lee, Jungwon; Han, Kwanghee; Lee, Moonkyu
Journal: Information Systems Research (2002)
<jats:p>Metrics for the architectural quality of Internet businesses are essential in gauging the success and failure of e-commerce. This study proposes six dimensions of architectural metrics for Internet businesses: internal stability, external security, information gathering, order processing, system interface, and communication interface. The metrics are based on the three constructs that have been used to evaluate buildings in the real world. The structural construct indicates that Internet businesses need to be stable internally and secure externally. The functional construct implies that Internet businesses should provide convenient functions in the information-gathering and order-processing phases. Finally, the representational construct indicates that they need to provide a pleasant interface both to the systemand to those using it. For each of the six metrics, we have constructed questionnaires to measure the perceived level of architectural quality and identified feature lists that may be closely related to the perceived quality level. Large-scale empirical studies were conducted both to validate the proposed metrics and to explore their relevance across four Internet b…