What forces are fueling electronic commerce?
There are several forces fueling the electronic commerce revolution. These are economic forces, availability of technology, and requirements by citizens and others that information and services be available quickly and at their convenience. The economic and technological forces are closely related. With the mass utilization of digital technology, our world has changed significantly. Now, it is possible to convert characters, documents, graphs, sounds, pictures, and video into bit streams of digital data. Once in digital form, the information can be combined, stored, manipulated, and transmitted quickly–in large volumes–without any loss in the quality. In local government there is relentless pressure to reduce costs and provide services more efficiently and effectively. These pressures make the low cost of information sharing and accuracy of electronic transactions very appealing. However, there are organizational impacts and investment costs in terms of the issues of information secu
