Greg Timbrell

Application Service Providers: Will They Succeed?

This article examines the likelihood of success for application service providers (ASP) drawing from the outsourcing literature, interviews with ASPs in the USA, and the experience of Bennett who has held leadership roles in ASP and ERP in South East Asia. This article proposes that application service providers (ASP) rent packaged software, predominantly over the Internet. It shows why organizations might employ the ASP model to manage their enterprise resource planning systems. Using a framework adapted from Lacity and Hirschheim, it demonstrates that the financial, business, technical and political reasons why organizations evaluate outsourcing can be applied to ASP model. While ASPs generally target the mid-market, large enterprises are also using ASPs to introduce new ERP modules. Potential users of ASP should regard the risks of outsourcing prior to entering into business arrangements. This examination concludes that there are strong financial and technical reasons for adopting the ASP model and therefore it has potential to succeed.

The implications of E-commerce for software project risk: a preliminary investigation

When a business introduces the use of e-commerce applications the software related business risks the business faces change. A corresponding change may also occur in the risks faced by the developers of the e-commerce applications. Unrecognised changes in the risks involved in software projects have considerable implications for a business. This paper reports the outcomes of the preliminary phase of a study into the implications of e-commerce for software project risk in financial institutions. Firstly, the analysis draws on the e-commerce and systems development literatures to determine the differences between e-commerce development projects and traditional development projects. Four key areas of difference were found between traditional projects and e-commerce including changes in the development process outcomes, changes in the development processes and methods, changes in stakeholder groups and changes in determining application requirements. Secondly, the differences are analysed against a set of software project risk factors from a recent reputable study. Each of the risk factors was affected in some way. Some of these impacts appear to be temporary, while others appear highly dependent upon the individual circumstances of the organization undertaking the project. Some risks did, however, appear to be permanently increased or decreased, thus signalling a fundamental difference in the overall risk profile of e-commerce projects when compared to traditional projects. Whether the impacts are temporary, contextual or permanent, they all have implications for way in which risk in e-commerce software projects is assessed and managed.