This thesis project has been performed at (and for) a company named Strödata. The purpose of the project has been to perform a risk analysis on Strödata’s web based business system, and specifically analyze how access to the business system through smartphones would affect the risks posed to the system. This has been done to help decide if smartphone access should be enabled. An implementation of a web application which is suited for use on a smartphone has also been developed, as a proof-of-concept, to grant access to a limited part of the business system. The method used to perform the risk analysis has been CORAS, as presented by Braber et al in [1]. CORAS is a risk analysis method designed with IT-systems specifically in mind. The method is divided into seven steps. The new web application is an ASP.NET MVC3 site that uses JavaScript, jQuery and Ajax-JSON. The risk analysis showed, among other things, that the benefits of enabling smartphone access to the business system are larger than the risks it introduces. Smartphone access also opens up many new possibilities to implement interesting new features or improve old ones. The risk analysis also showed that there are risks to the system that need to be dealt with. For these, risks treatments were identified to lessen their probabilities and/or their consequences should they occur. Some treatments were completely successful in eliminating the risks they treat, others were not. However, the treatments that were not completely successful did reduce the risks far enough that perhaps they should be re-evaluated as un-/acceptable. The conclusions that can be drawn from this thesis project are that although enabling smartphone access to the business system introduces new risks to the system, the access also reduces certain risks. How costly the new risks are and how much the access reduces risks varies from company to company and from system to system. For Strödata, the reduction to certain risks was large enough to outweigh the new risks that would be introduced. Regarding the possibility to implement smartphone access to the business system, it is possible using more modern technologies, methods and frameworks; such as those mentioned above.

The use of the Internet by web-based organizations impacts on all aspects of their business activities. The continuous evolution of e-commerce technologies enables web-based business (consisting of virtual supply chain partners) to integrate its manufacturing operations and to gain competitive advantage through entire virtual supply chains. Although the interplay of e-commerce and virtual supply chain cooperation is not clear when considering supply chain forecasting, planning, scheduling, execution and after-service, the potential for virtual coordination of business activities by means of e-commerce technologies is growing in importance. In this regard, networking capabilities that enable virtual organizing activities in the virtual value chain network are of particular importance to web-based organizations. The research investigated this using a grounded theory approach. The Grounded Theory analysis consisted of three phases. First, following a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, a set of particularly relevant articles was identified to provide the basic data from which to develop a first, preliminary framework or theory. This framework was subsequently refined to produce a concluding framework, using data collected during interviews with representatives of six different web-based businesses. Finally, the concluding framework or theory was validated by applying it to a particular case. The concluding framework contains twelve networking capabilities, adding three to the nine identified in the preliminary framework. The conceptual framework with theoretical description of relationships between identified networking capabilities clarify the use of networking capabilities with virtual organizing in a virtual value network of organizations. An interpretation of the concluding framework, based on Actor-Network Theory, shows how the entrepreneur can leverage the inter-relationships between the networking capabilities to enable more effective and efficient virtual organizing. In particular, it shows how the entrepreneur can utilize knowledge and skills related to the identified networking capabilities to build and maintain a stable and eventually institutionalized network of partners. Finally, using the results of this interpretation of the grounded theory, the entrepreneurial process was defined in which the role of information technology as well as the role of the entrepreneur in establishing and maintaining the virtual value network was described. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Informatics / unrestricted