Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal

Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce

Tim John Hughes,
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Tim John Hughes, (2002) "Marketing principles in the application of ecommerce", Qualitative Market Research: An
International Journal, Vol. 5 Issue: 4, pp.252-260, doi: 10.1108/13522750210443209
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Marketing principles in
the application of
e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
The author
Downloaded by COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL At 06:41 15 May 2017 (PT)
Tim John Hughes is a Senior Lecturer at Bristol Business
School at the University of the West of England,
Bristol, UK.
Keywords
Internet, Business development, Financial services,
Market orientation, Customers, United Kingdom
Abstract
E-commerce has been much hyped as a potentially
transformational force in many industries, and financial
services is an industry where its impact is expected to be
particularly strong. In this qualitative research four case
studies have been developed, from a series of in-depth
interviews, to investigate the way some UK financial
services organisations have responded to this innovation.
By taking a broad perspective, from a range of managers
across a number of disciplines, this study particularly
focuses on the application of marketing principles, on an
organisation wide basis, to the new challenges presented
by e-commerce. E-commerce can be seen to present
considerable structural and cultural challenges for large
established organisations. It is also potentially changing a
number of aspects of customer management. Significant
areas for further research are identified.
Electronic access
The research register for this journal is available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregisters
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1352-2752.htm
Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . pp. 252260
# MCB UP Limited . ISSN 1352-2752
DOI 10.1108/13522750210443209
252
Background to the research
E-commerce has been much hyped as a
potentially transformational force in many
industries. It is said to be the single biggest
opportunity and threat facing almost every
industry (Achrol and Kotler, 1999) and it is
claimed that companies have no choice but to
deploy Internet technologies to remain
competitive (Porter, 2001). Financial services
is an industry where its impact is expected to
be particularly strong (Birch and Young,
1997) because it changes the basic cost
dimensions of business and the distribution
structure (Durkin and Bennett, 1999). In
addition it is argued that by providing easier
access to information power moves more into
the hands of the customer (Mitchell, 2000;
Tapp, 2000). Given these predictions of the
transforming nature of e-commerce to
financial services there would seem to be a
requirement for more research in order to
understand this phenomenon more fully. The
piece of research described in this paper has
taken a case study approach, involving
interviews across a range of different
functions in four financial services
organisations; to obtain a broad based
managerial view of the way in which they have
been responding to these changes. In
undertaking this, the focus of the research has
been on how far marketing principles and
practice have been applied. In this the idea of
market orientation is considered to be central
as it represents a major model for responding
to change. Jaworski and Kohli (1993, p. 56)
suggest:
A market orientation essentially involves doing
something new or different in response to market
conditions, it may be viewed as a form of
innovative behaviour.
Hurley and Hult (1998) argue strongly that
market orientation is about the adoption of
new behaviours and that innovation should be
a component of the market orientation model.
Market orientation has been extensively
researched in quantitative studies across
many countries and industry sectors (see
Lafferty and Hult, 2001 for a review).
However there has been very little in-depth,
multi-respondent research into the way it may
operate in practice, in particular, from the
point of view of the many different functions
within an organisation. There has also been
little recent, in-depth, empirical research into
the operation of the marketing concept in
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
either the banking industry or other financial
services sectors although it is claimed that the
banking profession has largely failed to adopt
the marketing concept (Baker, 1993). Given
the fact that the whole financial services
industry is changing rapidly, research into this
would seem to be overdue.
Methodology
This paper describes a piece of qualitative
research involving four case studies which
have been developed from a series of in-depth
interviews. An initial pilot case study was run
in December 1999 and January 2000 and the
rest of the interviews took place between July
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and December 2000. Conducting multiple
case studies can be seen to be like doing
multiple experiments and provides a means of
enhancing the validity and reliability of the
research through triangulation. Conducting a
number of case studies also provides a means
of testing the information by comparing
between cases (Robson, 1993) and helps to
add credence to interpretations of the data by
allowing investigation of whether the
phenomenon remains the same in different
circumstances (Stake, 1995). In this study the
cases were chosen to represent the two major
categories of the financial services industry:
banking and insurance. The UK financial
services market covers a wide range of
institutions and it is difficult to conduct
research that comprehensively covers every
sector. However the main distinction made in
textbooks is between the two main market
sectors of banking (including building
societies) and insurance. Companies eligible
for the research had to have their primary
business in one or both of these core sectors of
financial services. It was also important that
they should have an existing involvement in
e-commerce and that there should be a willing
sponsor prepared to help in getting access to
managers within the business. This last point
was an important one from a practical point
of view. The method chosen for conducting
the case studies involved interviewing a
number of busy executives and managers
from different departments across each
organisation. One of the major considerations
was the difficulty in getting access to sufficient
people for in-depth interviews. The sponsor
was a senior contact who accepted
responsibility for getting the commitment and
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Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252260
involvement of the interviewees. This
sponsorship was very important and necessary
in getting sufficient access.
Individual in-depth interviews were chosen
as the main method for the collection of data
as they allowed the respondent to remain
anonymous and provided the opportunity to
probe and clarify points arising. It was also
the most practical way of getting participation
from busy executives and managers. The
interviews were semi-structured with a topic
guide to provide some structure and
consistency to the interviews. The topic guide
was used to give a direction to the interview,
but it was not used as a straitjacket and
respondents were encouraged to talk at length
within and around the topic areas. In addition
follow-up questions were used in the course of
the interviews, where necessary, to get
respondents to clarify or develop their
responses. Typically the functions
represented in the interviews covered:
. marketing;
. sales;
. operations;
. administration;
. human resources;
. IT;
. change management; and
. finance.
All interviews undertaken were recorded and
transcribed. The transcripts were then coded
with concepts and transformed and simplified
in order to facilitate display, analysis and
comparison along the lines recommended by
Miles and Huberman (1989). The coding was
revised and developed as the research
progressed. Displays were developed for the
different concepts, summarising the response
of each respondent and allowing cross-case
analysis.
Overview of the case studies
There was a strong consensus from across the
case study respondents that e-commerce
would be of immense strategic significance
for both their organisation and financial
services in general. There was less agreement
on the pace of change, although many
respondents felt that it would take many
years to be taken up by the majority of the
population. The impact was seen to be in
three major areas:
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
(1) the availability of far more information to
customers;
(2) the automation of transactions and
servicing; and
(3) the potential to reduce costs.
While there was a high level of agreement on
the eventual importance of e-commerce, the
ways that the four organisations were
responding to this new phenomenon varied
greatly, as described below. Each organisation
has been given a false name to preserve
anonymity.
Insco is a life company selling mainly
through independent financial advisors
(IFAs). The company had an active Web site
and was very much in an investigative phase
of looking at how e-commerce could be used
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to more effectively service both its
intermediary and end customers. However it
had not really taken steps to seriously address
the issue of how e-commerce could integrate
with the rest of the operation and did not have
a clear strategic direction for how it would
develop e-commerce in the future. The other
insurance company in the case study is
Internatco, an international life and general
insurance company that has grown rapidly
through acquisition. Here the major challenge
seemed to be that there were many separate
initiatives owned by different distribution
channels within the company and therefore
there was a fragmentation in the effort put
into e-commerce. In addition there was also a
major new e-commerce project underway that
had been initiated from the head office. While
respondents at Internatco recognised the need
for some fundamental change to reflect a
more consistent and direct approach to their
end customers there seemed to be some
enormous cultural and practical barriers to
overcome in achieving this.
The two banking organisations in the case
studies had progressed further than the
insurance companies in developing
e-commerce initiatives in their core
businesses. However they demonstrate two
different approaches, one being about
integrating the Internet as a channel with the
other methods of distribution, the other being
a standalone operation. Buildsoc has
traditionally sold primarily through a branch
network. It has had a presence on the Internet
for a number of years, but at the beginning of
2000 the decision had been taken, by the chief
executive, to really get into e-commerce in a
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Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252260
big way. The strategy for e-commerce at
Buildsoc was to use e-commerce to provide
customers with an alternative method to
transact on their accounts with a view to
reducing the proportion of transactions made
through conventional means in the branches.
The benefit of this will be to shift the burden
of administration work to the customer and
reorienting staff to other more profitable
customer-oriented activities, however it was
recognised that to achieve this type of a
business transformation would require a
sustained effort over a long time. In contrast
Interbank had been set up as a separate
operation from its parent retail bank. With a
distinct brand and a new operating style it was
targeting a younger group of customers.
Interbank had been set up with a flat
management structure and a cultural and
processes designed to respond to customer
feedback and provide a highly responsive
customer service. As a relatively small and
distinct operation Interbank has been able to
operate in a very different way than its parent
bank. This was made possible because it was a
new operation with new people and processes.
Its limitation of course is that customers do
not have the option for any face-to-face
service and are wholly dependent on their
willingness to operate their relationship with
the organisation remotely.
The marketing concept and strategy
development for e-commerce
The marketing concept with its central idea of
market orientation stresses customer focus,
but what emphasis can be placed on this when
dealing with a new phenomenon? There was
plenty of evidence in the case studies of the
widespread use of customer and competitor
feedback and research in general. This was
made up of both feedback through sales
contacts and also the use of a whole range of
more formal market research methods.
Indeed in the area of competitor research
there was often far too much information and
the problem for managers was in dealing with
it all. However there was little evidence that
market intelligence from customers had a
significant influence in making the big
strategic decisions that needed to be made to
mobilise the e-commerce projects in these
organisations. While undoubtedly the
managers in the case study organisations
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
would like to have a clearer vision of the
future provided by customers, the reality is
that they have to rely on what they already
know and gut feeling. The Buildsoc
technology manager sums up the situation in
making strategic decisions:
Nobody knows or even has a well-founded view
that will turn out to be the truth . . . the
organisational impact is unknown, the ground
rules are different . . . It's almost like how did gas
companies react, when electricity was
competitive? What is it we know about what
we've been doing previously which will help us.
That to me I see as the biggest challenge.
In taking this approach thinking has to be
flexible, as plans may need to alter. The
Interbank marketing manager warns against
being too prescriptive:
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Within Interbank I think we have a very clear
strategy, but not a very time detailed one,
because you don't know what's going to happen
three months down the line. Often there's the
danger of being too strategic and saying right in
three years time we will be doing this, this, this
and this.
This challenge of the need to anticipate the
future in dealing with innovation is not really
encompassed in the market orientation
models. Kohli and Jaworski (1990)
acknowledge that intelligence generation
involves anticipating customers' future needs,
but do not develop this thought. Indeed in a
later paper Jaworski and Kohli (1996) argue
that innovation is an outcome of market
orientation. The relationship between market
orientation and innovation is not clear. On
the one hand there is an argument (Hayes and
Abernathy, 1980) that a market-oriented
focus could be detrimental to innovation,
based on the idea that market orientation
seduces the business to being narrowly
interested in short-term customer needs. On
the other hand it is proposed that models of
market orientation should focus more on
innovation (Hurley and Hult, 1998). They
suggest that, if market orientation requires the
adoption of new behaviours (innovation), the
construct of innovation should be included in
the existing models of market orientation.
Other studies of market orientation (Narver
and Slater, 1990; Slater and Narver, 1994)
took the position that the existence of a
customer and competitor orientation in
creating customer value will be sufficient to
give a business a competitive advantage in all
circumstances. Latterly Slater and Narver
(1998) seem to have modified this view by
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Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252260
adding that a market-oriented organisation
develops long-term thinking and tries to
satisfy latent customer needs. However the
mechanics of market sensing in this way still
seems to be very vague and it is not clear how
it fits into the original market orientation
models. Slater and Narver (1999) admit that
the understanding of market orientation
continues to evolve and much is still
unknown.
The experience of the managers in the case
studies appears to be that although an
enormous amount of research and
intelligence was gathered and used within the
companies it was of only limited applicability
in developing strategy. This is because of
uncertainty about the future and the difficulty
in researching theoretical propositions with
customers.
The marketing concept and
organisational responsiveness to
e-commerce
For a market-oriented organisation it is not
enough to be focused on customers and
competitors; it is necessary to be responsive to
changes in the market (Kohli and Jaworski,
1990). In a large organisation this involves a
high degree of interfunctional coordination
(Narver and Slater, 1990). Small focused
teams have been instrumental in forcing
through change in both Buildsoc and
Interbank. The Buildsoc marketing manager
recognises the benefit of smaller group
decision-making to short cut bureaucratic
processes:
I think a lot of people are warming to the idea
that the business should be making the decisions
in smaller groups and those smaller groups
reporting their decisions to other groups, not
necessarily inviting other groups to comment.
There's got to be a corporate ownership and a
greater level of trust in people's decision making
. . . so I think the e-development has been a great
stimuli to say do we really have to make
decisions this slow and have committee meetings
all over the place?
This is also recognised by the Buildsoc retail
operations manager who suggests:
The answer might be to make yourself small in
the way you operate, but within a big context.
That sounds a bit odd, but if you look at the
companies that seem to be able to produce
things very quickly [they] are very small
companies. Then they get big and that slows
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
them down. It's a question of acting small but
being big, if that makes sense.
The need to see across the organisational
strands and also focus on the shortest timeline
for implementation is challenging and is not
something that traditional management
training has prepared people for (Smith,
1998). It requires seeing the detail for each
area and type of person involved, while also
keeping the big picture in mind. This cannot
be hierarchical (Miles et al., 2000) and
traditional rules do not always apply. In
Buildsoc and Interbank small teams with the
heavyweight support of their respective chief
executive were seen to be the best way of
overcoming some of the challenges in getting
change projects underway. However this was
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not the end of the story. Getting a change
initiative underway is only the start, it then
needs to be fully integrated within the
organisation.
In order to take advantage of the benefits of
e-commerce Porter (2001) stresses the
imperative for companies to develop tailored
value chains to build up defensible
competitive advantage. This involves a high
degree of cross-activity integration, for
instance sales activities linked with order
processing. There is an appreciation from the
Insco marketing manager that the response to
e-commerce should be integrated:
It's not just marketing, it's not just IT, it's
product development, it's the whole business
and I think people aren't aware of that enough
across the business to be thinking in those terms.
Despite the initial success of getting the
e-commerce projects off the ground, in some
of the case studies, there were very real
challenges identified in developing and
sustaining an integrated and coordinated
cross-functional approach to long-term
implementation, where it was taking place
within the existing organisation. In the
Interbank case study the creation of the
separate operation seems to have overcome
some of these by sidestepping the issue. The
point is that, for an existing company doing
business on the Internet, a range of
organisational issues arise requiring major
adjustments to the organisational
infrastructure: culture, people and structures
(Boddy and Boonstra, 2000). But changes to
mental models and norms (Kondra and
Hinings 1998) can be psychologically
threatening (Ashkenas, 2000). Therefore it
needs to be recognised that the strategic
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Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252260
decision to develop an innovation will have
massive organisational implications (Prahalad
and Hamel, 1990). The size of the challenge
is neatly summed up by the Insco
e-commerce manager:
The company started in [date] 150 years odd
of doing things by paper, it is hard to move the
whole organisation and there are few visionaries
around that realise that.
The issue of implementation of strategy is
recognised in the major market orientation
models, however it can be argued that this
element is explained less than
comprehensively. Kohli and Jaworski (1990)
have less to say on responsiveness than
intelligence generation or dissemination, but
it is at the core of their model. Responsiveness
is the action taken in response to market
trends, involving virtually all departments in
the organisation. However Jaworski and Kohli
(1993) acknowledge that their analysis does
not shed much light on the change process. In
the alternative model of Narver and Slater
(1990) the mechanics of responding to
change in an integrated manner is described
as interfunctional coordination. To
accomplish this effectively companies need to
develop horizontal structures and manage
projects through small multi-functional teams
(Slater and Narver, 1994), but they also need
to become learning organisations (Slater and
Narver, 1995). They agree with Day (1994)
that superior ability to learn is critical because
of the acceleration of technological change
and the need to development distinct
competencies to achieve competitive
advantage. However they accept that there is
no widely accepted theory of what comprises
the culture and climate of a learning
organisation.
The marketing concept and customer
management through e-commerce
The previous two sections have focused on
the operation of the marketing concept at the
levels of the development of strategy and
organisational change in relation to the
introduction of e-commerce. This section
focuses on the operational level in considering
how e-commerce on its own and in
conjunction with other channels is being used
in relation to customers. Respondents from
all four organisations mentioned three
common elements of customer management
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
that they expected to be delivered through
e-commerce. These were:
(1) the provision of information on individual
accounts;
(2) two-way communication with customers;
and
(3) self-servicing of transactions.
These contacts can be considered to be
significant to the marketing process because
of the importance of customer service as part
of a consideration of the total relationship that
the organisation has with the customer.
Relationship marketing has been put forward
as the new paradigm in marketing, in
particular with regard to its significance in
services companies. It is defined as being
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about establishing, maintaining, and
enhancing relationships with customers and
other partners (Gronroos, 1994, 1996) and
provides an alternative view to the traditional
US functional model of marketing. The
services marketing literature (Reicheld and
Sasser, 1990; Berry and Parasuraman, 1991)
stresses the link between service quality and
customer satisfaction and retention. It is
argued that by improving the quality of
service customer satisfaction will be improved
and in turn a satisfied customer will be
favourably disposed to a strong relationship
with the provider. There may be a new type of
opportunity to nurture customer relationships
by using e-commerce. It may have advantages
in optimising the quality of two-way contact
(Sharpe, 1999) and by combining the ability
to respond directly to customer requests and
to provide the customer with a highly
interactive, customised experience,
companies may have a greater ability to
establish, nurture, and sustain long-term
relationships (Winer, 2001).
At Insco the degree to which end customer
relationships are managed is strictly limited
because the primary relationship with the
customer is through the IFA and therefore
direct interaction with end customers through
either e-commerce or conventional means
was negligible. Similarly at Internatco the
focus in the past has not gone much past the
IFA. Therefore, according to the Internatco
project manager:
If you define our customers as IFAs, at least
initially, I think we are very well aware of what
IFAs are doing and what they want from
e-commerce.
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The Internatco sales manager notes that there
is a certain amount of commonality in the
approach of half a dozen large insurance
companies who have done their groundwork
to find out what IFAs want from e-commerce.
The Internatco organisation development
manager sees electronic automation to be a
source of competitive advantage to try and
develop a distinctive proposition for
intermediaries. At the same time a number of
the Internatco respondents recognise that
dealing primarily at arm's length to the
customer, through intermediaries, will be
challenged by e-commerce with the idea of
providing a direct route for the customer to
contact the company. With the development
of e-commerce it is anticipated that there will
be far more contact with end customers with
a big communications centre:
Now we will have more contact with them at
pre-sale and even more contact after the sale,
because they will be able to see their portfolio,
etc. (Internatco marketing manager).
This new operation selling direct to the end
customer is seen as a model for the future by
the Internatco organisation development
manager. The problem is that this is in
conflict with the existing way of operating in
business channel silos with each laying claim
to ``own'' their customers.
A similar challenge in managing customers
in a consistent manner across the many
different ways that customers may now
interact with the organisation is also
recognised by many of the Buildsoc
respondents. The Buildsoc business
improvement manager points out:
One challenge is to actually make that customer
experience and infrastructure as consistent as we
can across all channels . . . exactly how we
structure it . . . we need to think about it, but
perhaps we need to be looking at the needs of
customers, how they are defined across the
channel. There will be somebody looking at the
specific infrastructure associated with one
particular channel, but I think we should be
looking at the customer relationship and the
management of that across the piece.
There are major implications for branch roles
in customer management if increasingly
transactions become more self-service. In
theory advisors in branches could be more
focused on customer needs at different stages
of life and providing advice. In this
information collected online may help in
understanding customer needs, according to
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
the Buildsoc online services development
manager:
We want to build up a profile of the members'
habits online. If we're providing them with
non-financial content, we also get a better
picture of their interests and of their likes and
dislikes and that helps us build up a profile and it
helps us to further member relationship
management across all distribution channels.
At the same time the creation of a central
customer service unit to deal with telephone
and e-commerce customer contact means
that feedback is gathered in a central
administrative area and head office staff are
receiving direct communication from
customers on service issues. In taking an
integrated approach to e-commerce Buildsoc
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has added a further new channel and created
some major challenges for itself in effectively
and consistently managing the customer
relationship across both the traditional and
new channels.
Things are much simpler at Interbank,
where customer management is totally
confined to this one business unit. It is
claimed that Interbank was developed from
the start from the point of view that it needed
to be customer focused, with new staff, a new
culture and processes that were designed
around the customer and channel. Emphasis
is put on the way everyone responds to
customer comments. As the Interbank
business strategy manager says:
I think the trick is not only getting the feedback,
but being able to react to the feedback.
In talking about his role the Interbank
operations manager claims to worry about
what the customer worries about. He gives a
specific example of an exercise that
demonstrates this approach:
We're struggling at the moment to understand
the way in which customers are contacting us
and why they're sending us e-mails. Why they're
contacting us that way and how often do they
send us e-mails, how quickly do they want a
response to those e-mails? How do we schedule
our workloads internally within the service
centre to be able to handle those e-mails and
handle those secure messages and get them back
to customers within what they think is
reasonable, which is generally within 24 hours.
There is also a lot of emphasis at Interbank
on involving all staff in understanding
customer requirements and in improving the
service. Feedback is collected and then all
staff are involved in coming up with
suggestions for improvements. The aim is to
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Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal
Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252260
create an environment where staff act on
what they hear from customers, often taking
on responsibilities outside their nominal role
in order to resolve customer issues.
Interbank demonstrates the way that CRM
can be implemented effectively from a
standing start with new customers. The
advantage of short chains of command in
Interbank is that you can get things done
quickly as communications are simple and
decisions can be made rapidly. However it is
also recognised that this commitment to
reacting quickly to feedback needs to be
maintained despite the growth of the
operation. What Interbank does demonstrate
is how the marketing concept can work
effectively at the operational level. A strong
parallel can be drawn with Kohli and
Jaworski's (1990) information processing
model of market orientation in the way that
intelligence from the customer is collected,
shared within the organisation and acted
upon. Alternatively, taking Narver and
Slater's (1990) culture based model of
market orientation, Interbank can be seen to
have a very customer focused culture and it is
effective in achieving interfunctional
coordination in responding to customer
requirements.
Conclusions
This study has taken an in-depth approach to
investigating the way in which a number of
financial services organisations have been
responding to e-commerce. In particular the
question raised in this paper has related to
how far the marketing concept,
operationalised in the major market
orientation models, provides a sufficient
conceptual framework to guide practitioners
in responding to a new phenomenon such as
e-commerce. In taking an in-depth approach
with multiple respondents it has been possible
to get different perspectives from managers
who have a wide range of functional roles and
professional backgrounds. This provides the
necessary width of perspective that needs to
be brought to bear in considering an idea as
all encompassing as the marketing concept.
The rich data gathered raise some questions
about the adequacy of existing models to
explain certain aspects of market-oriented
innovation on a number of different levels. At
the level of strategy formulation it would seem
 Marketing principles in the application of e-commerce
Tim John Hughes
to be insufficient to focus on customers and
competitors and there are gaps in the market
orientation models in explaining the market
sensing and decision-making processes. With
the current fast pace of change, particularly in
the area of the application of technology to
established areas of business, such as financial
services, further research is needed to
understand the strategic decision-making
process and how it is related to an
anticipation of potential customer needs.
Implementing strategy in existing
organisations is recognised as a highly
complex and contentious area. At the
organisational level the interaction of
structure and culture in the change process
suggests that far more cross-discipline
Downloaded by COPENHAGEN BUSINESS SCHOOL At 06:41 15 May 2017 (PT)
research is required in extending our
understanding. Finally, at the operational
level, e-commerce and other new channels of
communication may be bringing new areas of
the organisation into direct contact with
customers, for the first time. In this the
application of the marketing concept would
seem to be an essential element. Further
development of a common framework for
understanding customer management, that
encompasses the whole range of contacts with
the customer, would seem to be a necessary
basis for achieving a more consistent
approach. These areas for research and
theoretical development are not only matters
of academic interest. For large organisations
making multi-million investments in
technology and struggling to deal with the
problem of how to deliver a coordinated and
integrated service in a multi-channel
environment they have very practical
applications.
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