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Strategic Utilization of Choice-Board Technology: A Conceptual Framework
Abstract
The advent of the new millennium has witnessed an increasing skepticism about the powers of information technologies (IT) to create business value, leading to sluggish investment in new IT. Generating business value using IT is a challenge in this environment. A critical element in this environment is the necessity to create a satisfied and an empowered customer. This paper describes an emerging technology, choice-boards, that allows customers to design their own product and services. More specifically, choice-boards are interactive, online systems that permit individual customers to custom design their own products by choosing from a menu of attributes, components, prices and delivery options [4]. Dell provides a popular instance of choice-board at its site, Dell.com. It is an important part of the firm’s web-based direct ordering system. Customers start with a basic configuration defined by a processor model and speed, and then go on to specify the full configuration of a personal computer with their choice of hard-drive size, memory, and add-ons such as CD-ROMs, multi-media, monitors and printers. 1) This paper provides a framework called choice-board pyramid that businesses can use to acquire competitive advantages in the market by successfully using the technology of choice-boards as a differentiating factor. The framework relates four factors: company strategy, consumer characteristics, systems and the service that is offered. The remainder of the paper will focus on choice-board systems, our framework and the hypotheses.
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