Case Scenario:
The Grover Cams Company manufactures cams and other components for diesel engines. As Web site manager for Grover, you created an attractive Web site that includes information about he company's history, its financial statements, and digitized depictions of the company's main products. You have been talking with your manager, chief information officer Tom Buckles, for several months about adding electronic commerce features to the Web site that will allow your smaller customers to order directly from Grover instead of through their local distributors. Tom finally created a capital budget proposal for the Web site expansion and submitted it to Grover's board of directors. The board always calculates and evaluates a capital project's return on investment before approving it. The board told Tom that the project did not provide a high enough financial return to approve it. However, the board realized the electronic commerce initiatives could be important to Grover's future strategic position in the business; thus it is willing to consider nonmonetary factors as a basis for approving the project. Tom would like to take the project back to the board next month, but he does not have a good sense of what nonmonetary factors might persuade the board to approve the project. He wants you to write a memo that outlines some of those factors and explains why they are important to Grover's future strategic position. Use the resources at Business Week's e.biz, CIO's E-business research center, internet.com's Electronic Commerce Guide or ZDNet's eBusiness Upadate as you prepare your memo.