Research Project for E-Commerce Adoption , Acceptance , and Prototyping in Abu Dhabi

The proliferation of Internet usage as a business environment is changing the way businesses structure their strategies and processes. The objective of this project is to specify the critical success/failure factors affecting the adoption of E-Commerce in the United Arab Emirates, particularly in the Abu-Dhabi as an example of Arabian Gulf countries. Another objective is to use the critical factors in proposing an E-Commerce prototype that suits that part of the World. Currently, the critical factors are being identified and assessed using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The first phase of this project involves surveying the factors that affect the adoption and acceptance of ECommerce, and administer questionnaires to identify the critical factors. Based on these factors, two models will be developed, one to address the E-Commerce adoption by businesses, and the second to address the ECommerce acceptance by customers. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) provides the theoretical foundation of the first phase. In the second phase, the critical factors are used to design and implement a Web-based E-Commerce model that will facilitate several activities such as; search for a product, making purchasing decision, and gathering pattern. The model will incorporate third-party authentication services to monitor vendors, and consumers. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE SURVEY E-Commerce can be defined as the process of sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. E-Commerce is evolving rapidly, moving well towards the creation of electronic markets. Clearly, E-Commerce has substantial advantages over traditional face-to-face and paper-based commerce. It gives the customers more choices and customized options by tying orders, design and production time more closely to product delivery. It decreases the time and cost of each search and discovery for customers as well as for those vendors that are trying to find customers. Moreover, with minimal capital outlay, equipment, space, and staff, it expands the marketplace from local and regional markets to national and global markets (Electronic Commerce, 1997). The generally acknowledged benefits of using E-Commerce include improved business opportunities, better record keeping, fewer mistakes, reduced processing delays, less reliance on human interpretation of data, more competition and lower prices, reduced order time, elimination of document losses, and better decisionmaking (Electronic Commerce (EC) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), 1997). Organizations throughout the world experience difficulty in information technology transfer. This problem is even more acute in developing countries, such as the emerging economies in the Arab world (Goodman, 1991; Knight, 1993; Antonelli, 1994). Although developing countries are eager to adopt new technologies, the process of adoption has been slow and the current utilization of IT is far below that achieved in industrialized countries. While finances were not a problem for the affluent countries of the GCC region, they have historically used far less than their available computing capacity (Attiyyah, 1989; Ibrahim, 1985; Yavas, Mushtaq, & Quraesh, 1992). With some notable exceptions, sporadic implementation and use are endemic throughout the Arab world (Cunningham & Srayrah, 1994). Anthropological studies suggest that much of the technology designed and produced in developed countries is ethnocentric, that is, culturally-biased in favour of their own social and cultural systems. Consequently, developing countries encounter cultural and social obstacles when attempting to transfer technology, created abroad, into practice at home (Yavas et al., 1992). A recent study, which used the Arab society as its setting, states that the Arab society has the most complex cultural and social system in the world (Straub, Loch, & Hill, 2001; Straub, Keil, & Brenner, 1997). The study tested the cultural influence model in the Arab region. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to validate and test the model. Furthermore, data analysis was based primarily on an Arabic-English questionnaire. In this study, primarily findings indicate that specific cultural components of Arab culture have an influence on how IT is viewed and the extent to which it might be utilized. Culture does not necessarily need to be viewed as a barrier that obstructs IT transfer. However, the study suggests that using specific cultural components will encourage the IT transfer process. Research into IT adoption and use has been motivated by the desire to predict the factors which lead to IT adoption and acceptance (Thompson R. & Rose, 1994). Over the years, the area of IT adoption and acceptance has received a great deal of attention and includes a wealth of research (our database contains 400 papers). Rose and Straub (Straub et al., 2001; Rose & Straub, 1998) stated that during the 80s, organizations throughout the Western developed countries started to use computer technologies. The new wave of attention was initiated by the increasing diffusion of networking technologies, such as the Internet, and the decreasing importance of geographical distances has given the chance for E-Commerce technologies to diffuse. Yet, while research in this area has been extensive, it has taken place almost exclusively in developed economies. This research addressed the transfer of Information technology to the Arab World, which is needed to specify the determinants of adopting and accepting E-Commerce IT related technologies in the gulf countries. In recent years, there has been an overwhelming amount of research attention in incorporating data mining tools and other techniques of Artificial Intelligence in developing E-Commerce models. These models could encourage the growth of E-Commerce and meet the end-user satisfaction by eliminating several critical failure factors (Hongium, 2000). Hongium investigated several techniques in building an intelligent system that can manage, and search web documents stored in an information provider’s web server. Techniques that were investigated include clustering of web documents, pre-fetching and caching and customized linkage of web documents. The major issues in this research include establishing measurements and heuristics on user access patterns 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING This conference paper appears in the book, Innovations Through Information Technology, edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. Innovations Through Information Technology 379 Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. and developing techniques to discover and maintain such discovered patterns. The results then were expanded in the direction of using the discovered user access patterns to manage web documents so that information subscribers can access information of interest more efficiently. In another study (Ke, 2000) has proposed a framework for designing web pages of directories/catalogue of products. In the first stage he proposed an algorithm that is based on the natural categorization of products/services and frequency of accessing product. In the second stage he implemented this algorithm and tested its performance. He also looked into how the traditional data mining tools can be used for web information sources, and what extension is needed. In other words, he addressed the issue of enlarging the application domain of data mining technologies to those generated by electronic marketplace and commerce. In some cases, existing data mining tools have been used. In other cases data have to be pre-processed first. In another study, Joshi at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Krishnapuram at the Colorado School of Mines developed in their collaborative project a scalable robust techniques for web personalization and mining (Joshi & Krishnapuram, 2000). These techniques were used to create a software tool for Web personalization and mining. Personalization has two components: (1) tailoring the content delivered to the user from a Web site; and (2) exploring the available Web pages and categorizing them. Their approach consisted of developing new practical clustering algorithms by combining fuzzy methods and robust statistics to model an unknown number of overlapping sets in the presence of outliers. Since numerical features cannot represent many Web objects such as URLs, IP addresses, Web pages, and snippets, new techniques to handle such Web objects, as well as to categorize them by using suitable similarity measures between such objects, were being explored. A software tool for Web personalization and mining was created and validated. The results of their project is expected to generate new theoretical results and efficient algorithms for simultaneously estimating the prototypes/profiles of an unknown number of overlapping categories from noisy data sets, as well as a Web personalization and mining tool that will be made available on the Web. Thus their work is expected to have a significant impact on the way documents are searched for and delivered. It will directly influence the usefulness and spread of the WWW, and will also contribute to the digital library technology. Dr. Radaideh worked on several projects (Sproule & Archer, 2000; Radaidah, 2001c; Sproule & Archer, 2000; Radaidah, 2001b; Radaidah, 2001a; Radaidah, 2001d) that involved indexing data, building searchable collections, building knowledge trees based on custom information categorizations and taxonomies, building components that inte