Market Interaction:

A Decision Style Approach for Creating Customer Value through Business Information Systems

Summary

The utility industry is now facing substantial regulatory and technological changes. Deregulation will force the development of new business strategies for creating more customer value than the competitors. New information technology (IT) can assist in this competition by providing interactive user interfaces to accommodate different kinds of customers. The pace of change and increasing sophistication of customers understanding and competitor actions necessitates various forms of collaborative strategies like virtual organizations in the existing extensive network of power producers and distributors.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how business and IT considerations can be combined to create more customer value through high-precision market learning and interorganizational systems in the utility industry. This is done by applying a Decision Style approach for accommodating different customer styles as well as organizational members’ styles of processing information.

Market interaction can be enhanced through a Decision Style approach to integrating business and IT sides of how customers and organizations meet. In particular, the utility industry is a prime candidate for such market interaction development given its extensive connections with customers and the growing importance of energy considerations for its customer base. Style-based business information systems enable value-creating user interfaces, which in turn enables interactive market learning systems for high-precision marketing efforts. Extending the range of these business information systems to include virtual organizations of power producers and their suppliers and distributors amplifies the strategic opportunities of such an integrated approach to market interaction.

The entire paper in PDF format.