Anxieties about establishing a company website:
1. High costs involved
It‘s costly to develop a website or to outsource (pay an information technology firm to develop the website) development due to the high level of expertise required. Maintenance costs of the website would also be very high since maintenance of websites is an activity that needs to be carried out frequently. The cost of hosting the website would also have to be considered.
2. Business process reengineering
Establishing a company website may involve change of business processes. Setting up an e- commerce site may force an organization to change its business processes to foster the selling of goods and services over the Internet. Changes to business processes may encounter internal resistance from company employees or external resistance in the form of customer reluctance to comply with the change e.g. customers may be reluctant to switch from the traditional channels of doing business to the Internet.
3. Exposure of organizational information to competitors
Setting up a corporate website would mean that organizational data such as the nature of its business and the products and services offered will be available to competing businesses. Some companies are usually conservative to setting up corporate websites because the information that is displayed on the websites could be used by competitors to improve their competitive advantage.
4. Security
If the company website is hosted (contained) within the company then setting up the website would expose organizational data to security threats from the Internet. The website would also provide an avenue for hackers to access the organization‘s computers.
5. Training
Company staff may have to be trained on how to use the website. For instance, employees may need to be trained on how to log-on and how to access, say, their business e-mails. Training would be expensive in terms of time and costs (trainers salaries).
Your managing director is in two minds about establishing a company website and has asked you to produce a “balanced report” on the pros and cons. You have already written several pages on the benefits and you have just started on a section headed “Anxieties”. What sub-headings might this section include?
