We have picked Walmart for this project. The description of the project is below.
This is your main class group assignment which requires writing one major essay, which will involve a significant amount of research and analysis, and therefore of collaboration within your group members. This essay involves a DSS design, evaluation and/or implementation of an online DSS site. For this task, you must find out about how to go about designing and implementing (or evaluating) a DSS to help customers purchase from an electronic website. In the discussion below, I am providing introductory details about the factors involved in this DSS design and implementation problem. So, please make sure to read it fully and have a serious group discussion before you can elaborate. This essay requires a report of 12 pages long for a group size of 3 or more (minimum, spacing is 1.5 with font size 12). The number of pages can adjusted upon request at the discretion of the instructor for smaller group sizes. Some additional details are seen at the end of this project description.
Assignment Description: DSS Evaluation and Implementation: In today’s age, decision support systems (DSS) have manifested themselves into a large variety of consumer, commercial, and government systems. Whether it is found aiding a shopper in the search of the best item to suit their needs, delivering the airline industry real-time flight, scheduling, and ticketing information, or navigating through complex communications planning system; DSS stands as a necessary tool for the decision maker. Although there are many facets of DSS technology available, the focus of this assignment will revolve around web-based DSS for consumer products/service selection process.
The desire to purchase a household item for many consumers today is many times met with a sense of overwhelming confusion due to the immense amount of products on today’s market. Simply put, the online market is packed with electronic catalogs displaying enormous choices of similar and competing products and services for purchase. The ability to navigate through these products/services in an online site along with the time sensitivity of a purchase plays a large role in the overall product selection by the consumer. The consumer is looking to make an informed decision based upon a variety of simple data points such as price, brand name, quality, and user reviews. Although many product selections take place either by suggestion via word of mouth or by basic product familiarity; online decision support systems play their roles by aiding the shopper through what is generally a difficult and probably unfamiliar buying experience. Good examples of this type of buying decision include purchasing an automobile, selecting a television, cell phones, cameras and other electronics goods, as well as choosing household appliances, or acquiring the service of a contractor, selecting a hotel, a car rental, or even selecting a restaurant for an important event, etc. This assignment is interested in your examination of currently implemented online decision support systems and how such systems can really help customers in their decision making processes for making product and service evaluation and selection. You will be asked to use your analysis to write a comprehensive essay regarding the evaluation and implementation aspects of an online DSS of your choice, which helps customers purchase electronic products or services. (Please wait to read the specific details of the essay which are described at the end.)
Currently, the software market continues to experience an increase in the demand of product and service selection tools such as Price Finder, Angie’s List, Groupon, and a tremendous number of online purchasing systems based on data warehouse framework, (e.g., Priceline, Expedia, Booking.com, Travelocity, etc.) It is noteworthy to state that electronic purchasing have expended well beyond service systems to include customers buying large expensive products such as homes, cars, and other goods. This phenomenon is clearly associated with the increasing popularity of e-commerce. Customers are leveraging the use of technology in the same capacity business owners are relying on information systems to improve operations and to react to market changes. Indeed, there are many websites offering tools to help customers in products and service selection. Examples include ExpertChoice.com (referred to during the discussions of AHP topics), activebuyersguide.com, review.ZDNet.com, and others.
Generally, the following assumptions are made in an attempt to best align a web-based DSS evaluation tool with the purpose of this assignment. You can assume that a DSS tool, that provides aide during the online evaluation and selection process (indeed, decision making process), will be able to have each of the following 8 capacities:
- be available to the public via the Internet,
- allow the user to choose a high level category of product/service type of their desire,
- allow the user to put constraints on the selection process (price, capability, brand names, etc.),
- allow the user to perform side-by-side comparisons of products/services in terms of capabilities, suggested retail prices, and possibly user reviews,
- allow the user to view product demonstrations and/or read reviews/ratings of actual end-users of the products,
- provide links to the manufacturers website(s) or reputable product information,
- provide links to where and how a consumer can purchase the product, and
- allow for good WOSP selection criteria, i.e., functionality, usability, flexibility, reliability, connectivity, privacy, extendibility and confidentiality.
Please use the above assumption to search the web for available consumer decision support tools for analysis in the assignment question seen in at the end of this discussion.
The first selected example website such as review.ZDNet.com; this is a website hosted by Ziff Davis and CNET Networks. Here is a discussion of this website which hosts a variety of reviews of technology items that would generally be sought by consumers such as computers, digital cameras, printers, cell phones, even automotive, among many others. As a representative sample run, assume we need to purchase a digital camera for purchase. A well designed DSS website should provide a concise list of high level categories/products types to choose from.
Copyright © 2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This selection should lead to a follow on screen that lists all products reviewed by an independent evaluator (e.g., for example by ZDNet). At this point the website must allow the user to put constraints on the search such as by price or manufacturer (i.e., a typical data-oriented DSS process).
Copyright © 2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
After making these selections user can decide to select numerous (say up to 10) different products regardless of manufacturer or price and view them in a side by side comparison.
Copyright © 2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Information regarding price ranges, high level technical specifications, performance summary, and editor ratings should be viewed in an easy to follow side-by-side comparison. If a user shows interest (i.e., decides that they are interested) in a particular product/service and wishes to drill down deeper into product information they should be able to do so by selecting any of the products of interest. The website should then provides a comprehensive view of the product/service, in many cases a demo video of the product in use to simulate actual look and feel, expert and consumer reviews, a complete list of technical specifications, and links to where to shop for the item.
Copyright © 2006 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
One can clearly see the major advantages to the user/consumer of this type of DSS technology. The consumer, in a matter of minutes can familiarize themselves with a product, read what experts in the field think about it, read what fellow consumers think about it, understand its complete capabilities sets, and receive real-time pricing and availability information. It should be easy to imagine the tremendous benefits that such a consumer focused decision support system will bring to the online market; in effect aiding the consumer through what would generally be a complex and in many cases a confusing/ill-structured product/service selection process by delivering the necessary elements for a consumer to make well informed decisions and also uncertain purchasing experience. Along with the obvious strengths of this technology, there are potential weaknesses that may negatively influence the buyer’s decision making process (some of these are related to WOSP selection criteria). These influences most likely would be the influence of manufactures on the provider of such DSS technology among other considerations. Effectively, a provider such as ZDNet (and other independent evaluators) could be influenced whether monetarily or by other means to give more attention to particular products, or manufacturers, or service providers. This could be found by a website pushing a product and in effect marketing the product ahead of others in the selection process or not providing the same level of analysis and detail as others receive. Of course there are technological challenges of a DSS support system that could negatively impact the consumer such as inaccurate information, dead links, and malfunctioning website modules. However, the main negative impacts to the consumer would be in the DSS provider was biased in the product selections returned to the user.
Clearly, online DSS technology is completely relevant and necessary in today’s consumer market. This technology needed to be developed to support the multitude of products/service available in today’s online marketplace. With a paradigm-shift in consumer buying habits away from brick and mortar storefronts to the online shopping providers, special provisions have to be made through the industry to account for this shift. Brick and mortar companies now have both real and virtual store fronts. Large retailers now provide users with product selection technology on their website to first help their customers narrow down their product search and once a product is chosen help link customers to additional products and services that compliment their original selection. Obviously, the today’s technological solution will only expand and become more integrated into tomorrow’s business opportunities. I am sure that we can all agree that, as web-based technology progresses together with the availability of DSS tools, consumers will be given the ability to make complex purchasing decisions not only from their home computers, but also from their mobile devices such as cell phones. The unstoppable progress will in turn create further needs for supporting technology to support decision making process including but not limited to group decision, KM technology, and more. All of these will undoubtedly involve the full spectrum of WOSP selection criteria.
One of the difficult and challenging decisions for online customers is the problem of selecting and purchasing cell phone from a website (and related contract). Clearly, there are more than a hundred cell phone manufacturers in the world designing many different models of mobile phones and the number of worldwide cellular connections has increased from 800K in 2001 to more than 2200 (in 2006); and has probably triple every 3 years since. Indeed, selecting a phone is also complicated due to the many factors as seen in the table below. Increasing number of mobile phone models and features can cause information overload to customers (indeed, to both online and off line customers). Thus, selecting the right phone is more time consuming and more stressful than it needs to be.
This assignment requires a study of an online DSS implementation for cell phone evaluation and selection using the above discussions and WOSP selection criteria. (Please see the WOSP paper in Module 5.) The result of your group work is to provide system analysis and design of a web-based support system by testing different suitable methods to help online customers reduce information overload during the phone evaluation, selection and purchase decision. The emphasis is to increase user satisfaction during the full spectrum of the decision process. Your recommended DSS process must combine the selection and evaluation of the products properties (i.e., brand, color, camera, and many other features seen in the table, with the 8 WOSP selection criteria (i.e., usability, functionality, etc.) to improve decision process satisfaction (i.e., effectiveness, efficiency and other desirable characteristics). You may search the Internet for available search, selection and evaluation tools to be combined with your knowledge from materials discussing DSS and BI (Textbook chapters 3 to 9) and the WOSP Paper#19 listed among the research papers on our course website. Please consider the factors discussed in the paper by Whitworth, B., Bañuls, V., Sylla, C., & Mahinda, E. (2008), for the evaluation of IT/IS. This paper is entitled “Expanding the Criteria for Evaluating Socio-Technical Software,” IEEE Transaction on Systems Man & Cybernetics, Part A, Systems and Humans, 38 (4), July 2008, 777 – 790 (This paper is also seen listed among the reading materials posted on the course website.).
This paper describes a technology assessment model, called WOSP, for a Web of System Performance, providing a framework to help assess and evaluate a web-based information technology (be it an online DSS, a BI, or a KM based system). WOSP is designed to ease the evaluation of a socio-technical information or decision making system. Such system can be used to support a “Yield Management-based system”, or an e-commerce system, or any other computerized human-machine system for decision making. Your focus is to analyze mostly from the user’s point of views (same is generally implied for web based IT/IS).
Specific Tasks of the Essay: Please write an essay to show how your online DSS will work with an electronic catalogue using all of the capacities listed above (note that the last one invokes all of the 8 WOSP selection criteria). Your process may begin by helping the customer to carry out (1) an examination of a full catalogue (as needed with a review of the full category), (2) help to select by properties and criteria, (3) and then shorter the catalogue for final comparison and selection. To comply with the true definition of a DSS, your system must provide a ranked list of the best choices (say the best 4 to 6 phones) based on the customer preference and ranking. A true DSS must not provide only one choice to the customer. Customer may be able to see another ranking of the candidates based on his sensitivity analysis. You may not be able to develop the system, but you must provide a complete flowchart (or flow diagrams of the decision process) and tables as you wish.
Please do study the Paper on “Faculty evaluation and selection,” and all related papers seen listed in the research papers on our course website. Please do cite all of the materials you find and use from your research. This Essay requires a minimum of 12 pages for a group size of 3 or more (or a minimum of 10 pages for group size 2, and 7 pages for the group of one member). You will receive extra points (up to 5 extra bonus points on the final course average) if you also provide a very well made and narrated presentation of your proposed DSS (minimum of 12 slides is required).
Useful study all of the materials and web tools include (but are not limited to) the Analytic Hierarchy Process and related implementation (see for example www.Expertchoice.inks to an external site.
WARNING: As done in the previous assignments make sure to provide sufficient amount of research support for all your arguments and do embed your reference near each statement you took from the literature. I noted a considerable amount of copying in many of the previous submissions, especially in your second Assignment that I am now evaluating. As you know, to take any information from other sources without proper credits (with citation) is known as plagiarism. NJIT honors codes do not allow you to plagiarize. Please do submit your completed work to Turnitin (available on our course website) and fix all problems regarding giving proper credits to the sources of all your information. To not do so can result in significant consequences for plagiarized materials in your submission.
Below I have attached the description
