222 Chapter 8 Discussion Introduction This chapter reflects on the ...

Company policy on intermediation might similarly change in line with overall e-
commerce strategy. At the time of the study, policy suggested allowing
disintermediation of a limited number of less competent / technologically reluctant
suppliers. Whilst intermediaries would not be deliberately cut out of the chain, there
might be a more subtle process where certain suppliers are favoured over others, with
the main objective of improving customer service provision.
Such fast-changing policy implies that the model will be increasingly difficult to keep
up-to-date and relevant. <strong>This</strong> is an unfortunate but typical state of affairs where e-
commerce policy is concerned – it should be remembered that industry is still in the
very early stages of developing Internet EC systems. Furthermore, other research
(Caswell 2000) has shown that manufacturers are not very successful at stating their
EC policy, though at least most are aware of the likely importance of this technology
in the future. These factors underline the difficulty of doing modelling to inform
policy making in this area.
These difficulties notwithstanding, I do believe that the approach has potential to be
used in a more interventionist manner. There are a number of conclusions that can be
made from the evidence of this project, which would guide future participatory
projects to make them more useful to stakeholders. Firstly, there needs to be
developed ways to speed up the development process of models to complete them in a
more useful time frame. Secondly, it was apparent that developing better visualisation
tools would illustrate the dynamics of the model and make the simulation outcomes
more understandable. Thirdly, developing closer links by planning for regular
meetings would give the stakeholders more control over the direction of the research,
and allow them to fine-tune it as their needs change over the course of time.
It should be stated that, as a modeller entering an organisational setting for the first
time, I was very much on a learning curve in forming my strategy for doing
participatory research. Without taking much heed of other participatory approaches, I
conducted the research on e-commerce impacts with the input of the two stakeholders
who were acting as my ‘sponsors’. As demonstrated in section 8.1, this rather naïve
approach lead to the unfolding of research issues typical of those relating to what are
considered the ‘classic’ problems of ethnography, i.e. access and field relations.
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