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List Price: $34.99 Our Price: $27.99 You Save: $7.00 (20%) Textbook Binding - 247 pages 1 edition, Prentice Hall; Dimensions (in inches): 0.63 x 9.22 x 6.89 Electronic Commerce Relationships: Trust By Design by Peter G. W. Keen (Editor), Craigg Ballance, Sally Chan, Steve Schrump Possibly the most important books on ecommerce to come along. In the last week, you almost certainly used your credit card in a restaurant, but you didn't follow the waiter through the door to double-check that he or she didn't imprint the card twice or photograph your signature. You trust the system. But you may be one of the 60% of people who report when surveyed that they are not yet comfortable giving their credit card number to make a purchase on the Internet. You probably made a cell phone call last week, too. Cell phone fraud is many times higher than credit card fraud. But again, you trust the cell phone system more than you trust the Internet. Electronic commerce (EC) represents the future of commerce, with the Internet the most obvious driver. Just in the past five years we have seen companies like Dell, Schwab, and Cisco extend their customer relationships their traditional commerce into this new style of business and quite literally make billions of dollars in doing so. We have seen a far more cautious shift in consumer behavior, but just about every business person and most consumers accept that at some point, EC will be as much a part of their everyday life as are credit cards and cell phones. Ask them when that will occur and their answer will basically be, "When we can trust it?" Ask the customers of the Dells, Schwabs, and Ciscos why they use EC and the answer will be, "It is a better way of doing business for us and we trust it." Ask them why they will trust it, they will say, "Because it is reliable, we feel safe in providing information, any problems are quickly recognized and responsibly dealt with, and we don't worry." Then, we trust the relationship. It removes our fear of the unknown. What is EC? Just two years or so ago, the answer might have been a "fad Internet hype" or "online transactions" or "paperless business." There's still no real definition, but it's more and more equated with an essential element for ensuring business innovation and even industry survival. In other words, EC is now very much moving into the mainstream, not lurking on the periphery of business. It's already turned the rules of competition upside down in such industries as securities trading, travel reservations and sales, PCs, and book and music retailing, and has profoundly changed supply chain management in manufacturing, retailing, and distribution. Trust is the very foundation of commerce and EC doesn't change that. What EC does, though, is challenge many of the trust assumptions and processes that paper commerce now takes for granted, even those are often vulnerable, though built up over as much as centuries and supported by law, professional expertise, and experience. Author PETER KEEN is Chairman of Keen Innovations, and has served on the faculties of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. His books, including The Business Internet (1998) and Process Edge: Creating Value Where It Counts (1997), have strongly influenced the business technology dialogue worldwide. CRAIGG BALLANCE is a Partner with E-Finity Group in Toronto, Canada, and co-author of On-Line Profits: A Manager's Guide to Electronic Commerce (Harvard Business Press). Keywords: Business: Marketing, eCommerce, Office management, promotion, security (Business), - 2/15/00