| dc.description.abstract | "All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
WB. Yeats
The advent of e-cornrnerce is changing the game of business, threatening the very
existence, not only of firms, but also of whole industries. Industries are frantically
restructuring, with old businesses finding new ways of running their old businesses, and
new businesses springing lip. This new environment is change itself.
Perhaps due to the speed of change, there is little generic strategic guidance available to
the business manager to help them navigate through the uncharted waters of the new
domain of business. There also seems to be little work on the actual value that firms can
hope to get from participating in e-commerce, which would make the new environment
relevant to established and evolving new businesses.
This study investigates the applicability of an existing conceptual model of the business
value of e-cornmerce to assess its applicability in Kenya. Specifically, a survey of early
adopters of e-cornmerce in Kenya was carried out to establish strategic benefits that they
are getting out of e-commerce . Strategic value of e-commerce would serve as
prerequisite to establishing the right online objectives and hence stralcgy to enable
Kenyan firms succeed in this domain.
The study therefore explores the applicability of a ten-component model of the value of
e-commerce in the Kenyan context. The results were based on an empirical investigation
of 48 firms who have been on the lnternet for at least three years.
The results obtained from the analysis indicate to a large extent that the 10-component
model of e-commerce value proposed by Bloch, Pigneur and Segev applies in Kenya
based on the selected firms. Descriptive statistical analysis and factor analysis using
SPSS gave satisfactory results that e-commerce is three dimensional construct as
proposed by the adopted framework.
The conclusions reached were mainly broad based and appeared to suggest that early
adopters of e-commerce in Kenya are getting certain benefits in terms of improvement,
transformation and redefinition of their business processes, models and products | en |
