EXPLORING THE TRANSFORMATION OF TOURISM FIRMS' OPERATIONS AND BUSINESS MODELS THROUGH THE USE OF WEB MAP SERVICES
Μαριάννα Σιγάλα · 2009
The production and consumption of tourism experiences demand the use of mapping services. Nowadays, the ubiquitous and open standards of the Internet have given rise to distributed GIS and web map services, while Web 2.0 have further expanded the functionality of web map services. This study aims to first analyze the functionality and the services of web map services, and then, to investigate the types of their exploitation by tourism firms that in turn transform the ways in which firms design their business operations and business models To that end, after defining web map services as a form of distributed GIS (and so, as a type of a web service), the first section debates how the capabilities of web services enable the redesign of business operations and models. The section continues by analyzing and identifying the functionality of web 2.0 enabled web map services that can be integrated into business operations. Having identified the functionality of web map services, the second section of the paper adapts Venkatraman’s (1994) model on IT-induced transformation in order to identify and classify the different levels and types of exploitation of the functionality of web map services by tourism firms. Each type-level of exploitation of web map services is analysed by presenting different examples of web map services’ applications from the tourism industry. The analysis of these examples also considers the impacts of web map services on the business operations and models. Finally, the practical and theoretical implications of the proposed framework are discussed.