Virgin Mobile E-Business Assessing Lessons

Virgin Mobile e-Business

Assessing Lessons Learned from Virgin Mobile's e-Business

The rapid ascent and continued success of Virgin Mobile as a pay-as-you-go telephone services provider is attributable to the high level of synchronization between the Virgin Group and Sprint. The formation and rapid introduction of services by Virgin Mobile USA is an indication of what can be accomplished when forethought goes into creating an effective Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can support scalable, secure Web Services. The SOA platform also supports 26 different application integration options to ensure that Web Services applications can gain access to the data they need to complete key ordering, pricing, logistics, fulfillment and services functions as well. The forethought that went into creating an SOA framework or platform that can support the nation's first Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) that would scale to 2 million contracts is today one of Virgin Mobile USA's greatest assets. This unique business model, supported by a unique SOA framework and Web Services for managing each phase of a customer relationship and service call, has given the company the ability to keep selling and customer support costs down (Mehta, 2004). In analyzing the lessons learned from Virgin Mobile USA's ability to create a successfully operating Joint Venture with Sprint and integrate legacy systems together to support 2 million contracts, the issues of security, defining critical success factors for e-commerce systems, and the ethics of how those systems are used are provided in this paper.

Critical Success Factors of e-Commerce Systems

Of the many critical success factors that led to Virgin Mobile USA being so successfully with their process, systems and strategy integration with Sprint was a clear focus on the customer and their needs. The case alludes to the fact that not only is the partnership unique in that it is the first Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) but also how Virgin Group and Sprint were able to quickly integrated systems together and devise strategies for ensuring 26 different systems could successfully work with one another to support customers and their contracts. The ability to integrate systems together so they support a common, customer-driven view of the business is a critical success factor for enterprise computing strategy growth, security and stability (Turban, Gehrke, 2000). The integration aspects of e-commerce systems also have a major impact on the user experience and how they are designed to support guided selling, catalog management, online ordering and product configuration (Bellizzi, 2000). For Virgin Mobile USA, this aspect of their it strategy is crucial to gaining new customers and accelerating the launch of new phones, as the case shows how much they rely on multichannel marketing and distribution. This reliance on multiple selling channels also underscores the need for tight levels of system integration to support supply chain management, fulfillment and order management systems that are mentioned in the case study as well. Integration across the entire website is a critical success factor because it also delivers consistent results to all inquiries as well from customers, making a website more trusted over time (Bellizzi, 2000). The ability of a website to report back through any channel the identical response to a customers' query shows how well integration and customer relationship management strategies have been planned out or not (Bellizzi, 2000). Virgin Mobile USA realizes this and created the 26 application connectors to enable this level of communication across its many selling and distribution partners while at the same time concentrating on how to create a unique online experience as well. Too often companies will rely purely on the look-and-feel of their websites instead of concentrating on the back-office integration of systems to ensure a very high level of accuracy, responsiveness and speed to customer requests. The best performing websites globally however have taken a systemic and highly integrative view of how they construct their online systems to support transactions, with SOA platforms and Web Services supporting transactions with scalability across computing and web-based platforms (Fletcher, 2009). Virgin Mobile has been able to successfully accomplish this by concentrating on the need for legacy system integration to Sprint systems while also adopting a much more flexible and agile SOA architecture to support Web Services as well. The combination has been a very powerful, scalable and secure platform for enabling greater levels of performance and freedom in defining the front-end interface or graphical user interface of the site.

Another key success factor of any successful website is the development of analytics to track visitors, their behavior, purchase activity and service satisfaction (Ghandour, Benwell, Deans, 2010). The case only alludes to this aspect of the Virgin Mobile USA website from the standpoint of Web Services being able to track overall website activity and traffic. This is however an area of best practices that continues to gain momentum and focus within businesses globally, as analytics is critical for measuring all aspects of online marketing and promotion. The best practice of measuring system performance including the accuracy and transaction speed of the 26 different system connectors is also critically important as well. Virgin Mobile USA has devised an SOA architecture that can quickly scale across their entire business model, delivering consistent results to each of their channel partners, service providers and those visiting online. The breadth and sophistication of their SOA architecture and Web Services shows that analytics is also a core part of their line strategy as well. Any SOA architecture will by definition have an element of analytics within it; the decision of how best to use them to measure ongoing e-commerce success is up to the architects and strategies creating the solutions (Turban, Gehrke, 2000).

In conclusion, it can be seen from the enterprise-wide system strategies the company has taken on that the focus on back office integration creates a stable and secure, scalable and pervasive e-commerce platform to build on. The level and extent of integration is critical for customers to get a consistent response to their queries on pricing, availability, product selection and a consistency to the product ordering process as well. All of these factors are crucial for an e-commerce system to gain and keep the trust of the consumers who use it (McCole, Ramsey, Williams, 2010).

Security

E-commerce platforms and systems vary significantly in their levels of hardened features and scalability, authentication and single-sign-on capabilities (Gomez, Lichtenberg, 2007). They also vary in terms of their customization and integration to legacy systems, which is a critical success factor for Virgin Mobile USA and Sprint combining their systems. The use of security systems in the context of e-commerce needs to be multi-channel and multi-role-based to ensure consistency of protection for online shoppers as well (Fletcher, 2009). The challenges for Virgin Mobile USA include creating a more secured online experience to the browser level, taking into account the literal thousands of browsers on the market today, in addition to modeling each phase of the online ordering process as well. These critical functions can only be accomplished by first taking a more back-office approach to system security and security policy by the Web Services level to ensure secure transactions over time are occurring (Gomez, Lichtenberg, 2007). There is also the need for ensuring the catalog management, pricing and order management systems all stay secure over time as well, with the need for defining validation of each approach and on-ramp to the systems so that user's data can be protected in any and all scenarios they will be logging into the systems under (McCole, Ramsey, Williams, 2010). Finally, Virgin Mobile USA needs to concentrate on creating Web Services dedicated to security alone, so the company can move aggressively forward into new e-commerce and m-commerce initiatives including mobile payments and support for a wider variety of smartphones supported as of 2011.