Modeling business representational activity online: A case study of a customer-centered business

Abstract

What kinds of content - information and interactive mechanisms - should businesses put online? Existing online businesses are driven largely by metaphors of the web as 'online catalog brochure'. Clearly, such a limited approach under-utilizes the interactive capabilities of online technologies. In this paper, we argue that successful businesses have likely evolved non-obvious 'offline' practices that can be translated to online practices. We show how such practices can be uncovered by observing representational activity in a business. Specifically, we introduce a distributed-cognition based method for analyzing representational activity in terms of the movement of information across media, which enables us to systematically explore the space of potential interactive mechanisms. We demonstrate our method on a successful small business that would not at first appear to benefit from online content beyond that provided by the catalog metaphor. The analysis revealed several novel interactive mechanisms, including a product expert that personalizes a combination of products based on customer-specified problems, and a mechanism that automatically calculates product consumption rates, sending customers e-mail reminders to repurchase products near the end of their life span. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.