Electronic Business Model SelectionUsing The Analytic Hierarchy Process

The rapid global development of electronic business (e-business) and information technologies has required managers to make decisions to balance technical factors with strategic business goals. Enterprises need to have a strategy before they start an e-business. They have to understand the fundamentals of a business and plan how a future business should look like. Therefore, an e-business model should be planned before starting an e-business. There have been many studies on e-business models throughout the world. However, by the time the e-business has not penetrated appropriately in Iranian companies. This research tries to providing useful information on e-business models for Iranian companies. Since not all of the existing e-business model can be applied to any company, the research has proposed a method based on analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to provide insight into selecting an appropriate business model. The method uses a panel of experts to select between a wide variety of available business models. In addition, the benefits and challenges of e-business development in Iran are categorized.The nature of this paper is to provide useful information on e-business models for Iranian companies. Therefore, future research is planned to empirically validate the proposed process.

Keywords:

business , analytical hierarchy process , Electronic business models