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Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 165

surveyed marketing professionals from 100 UK-based organizations across the retail,
financial, travel and online gaming sectors. More than a third of failures were rated as
‘serious to severe’, with many customers complaining or unable to complete web
transactions. These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are
owned by others in the business, but marketers need to ask the right questions. The
SciVisum (2005) research showed that nearly two-thirds of marketing professionals did
not know how many users making transactions their web sites could support, despite
an average transaction value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into
campaign plans. Thirty-seven per cent could not put a monetary value on losses
caused by customers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organizations experi-
enced web site overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication
between the two departments.
SciVisum recommends that companies do the following:
1 Define the peak visitor throughput requirements for each customer journey on the
site. For example, the site should be able to support at the same time: approxi-
mately ten checkout journeys per second, thirty add-to-basket journeys per
second, five registration journeys per second, two check-my-order-status journeys
per second.
2 Service-level agreement. More detailed technical requirements need to be agreed
for each of the transactions stages. Home-page delivery time and server uptime
are insufficiently detailed.
3 Set up a monitoring programme that measures and reports on the agreed journeys
24/7.

Service-level agreements
Service-level To ensure the best speed and availability a company should check the service-level agreements
agreement (SLAs) carefully when outsourcing web site hosting services. The SLA will define confirmed
A contractual specification
of service standards a standards of availability and performance measured in terms of the latency or network delay
contractor must meet. when information is passed from one point to the next (such as London to New York). The SLA
also includes notification to the customer detailing when the web service becomes unavailable
with reasons why and estimates of when the service will be restored. Further information on
SLAs is available at www.uk.uu.net/support/sla/.

Security
Security is another important issue in service quality. How to control security was referred
to in the earlier section on firewalls and is considered in detail in the Focus on security
design (Chapter 11, p. 652).

Managing employee access to the Internet and e-mail

This is covered in Chapter 11 in the Focus on e-business security section.

Managing e-business applications infrastructure

E-business
applications Management of the e-business applications infrastructure concerns delivering the right
infrastructure applications to all users of e-business services. The issue involved is one that has long been a
Applications that provide concern of IS managers, namely to deliver access to integrated applications and data that are
access to services and
information inside and available across the whole company. Traditionally businesses have developed applications
beyond an organization. silos or islands of information, as depicted in Figure 3.17(a). This shows that these silos may